The Veil nebulae and Pickering's Triangle

Data from November 17th and 19th 2025 were used for this image.

The equipment used were an Altair Starwave ASCENT 60ED doublet refractor with field-flattener, a Pegasus FocusCube v2 focuser, an SVBONY 605CC 14 bit OSC camera, an Altair 2” magnetic filter holder version 2 containing an Altair quadband filter.  All were mounted on a Celestron AVX mount.  An SVBONY SV165 guide-scope fitted with a QHY-5II-M guide camera was mounted on the imaging scope. An INDI server was running on a Linux computer indoors. The guide camera was connected by USB to another Linux computer indoors running PHD2 autoguiding software via the INDI server. The mount and the focuser were controlled by AstroDMx Capture via the INDI server.

24 x 5 minute exposure frames of the West Veil nebula and Pickering's triangle and 24 x 5 minute exposure overlapping frames of the East Veil nebula and Pickering's triangle were captured on separate nights along with 5 dark frames, 50 flats and 50 bias frames.

The data were calibrated, debayered, stacked and part processed in PixInsight and further processed using GraXpert, Gimp3, MS Image Composite Editor to stitch the two stacked images together and SetiAstroSuitePro for Texture, Clarity, Cosmic sharpen and denoise.

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The Veil nebulae and Pickering's Triangle

With boosted luminance

The SVBONY 605CC 14 bit OSC camera performed very well with this equipment.

The Christmas tree cluster (NGC2264) and associated nebulosity with duo-band filters

Using an Altair Starwave ASCENT 60ED doublet refractor with field-flattener, a Pegasus FocusCube v2 focuser, an Altair Hypercam 533C 14 bit OSC CMOS camera and a PlayerOne Phoenix 2" filter wheel all mounted on a Celestron AVX mount.  An SVBONY SV165 guide-scope fitted with a QHY-5II-M guide camera was mounted on the imaging scope. An INDI server was running on a Linux computer indoors. The guide camera was connected by USB to another Linux computer indoors running PHD2 autoguiding software via the INDI server. The mount and the focuser were controlled by AstroDMx Capture via the INDI server.

One hour's worth of 5 minute exposures of NGC2264 through an Altair HaO3 filter and one hour's worth of 5 minute exposures through an Altair S2O3 filter were captured by AstroDMx Capture running on an Ubuntu mini computer. 

The Data were debayered and stacked in PixInsight, part processed in PixInsight, Gimp3 and SetiAstroSuitePro. The Ha, S2 and O3 channels were separated out from the HaO3 and S2O3 images and used to contruct narrowband palettes. Siril was used for pixelmath procedures.

The Christmas tree cluster (NGC2264) and associated nebulosity

Hubble palette

Classical SHO

HOS (Canada, France, Hawaii telescope palette: CFHT)

OSH

Pixelmath generated palettes

Gendler palette

ForaaX palette

Again, the PlayerOne Phoenix 2" filter wheel was controlled natively by AstroDMx Capture and proved very useful for rapid filter change of the parfocal Altair 2" duo-band filters.

Nicola is getting close to releasing Version 3 of AstroDMx Capture. The complete refactoring of the code-base was started in order to make the software fully compatible with Wayland in Linux. As major distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu are preparing to stop support for X11, the refactoring has been essential. Nicola also made the decision to switch from wxWidgets to Qt which has become a better platform for the advanced functionality of AstroDMx Capture. When Version 3 is released it will have similar functionality to the latest Version 2. Version 3 will be more efficient, and will have significant additional functionality. It has been necessary for Nicola to maintain two code-bases in order to support the large number of users across all of the supported operating systems. This has, of course, led to some delays, but the project is well on track. Once Version 3 has been released, continued development of Version 2 will stop and additional functionality will be phased in according to Nicola’s roadmap. 

The code refactoring to date exceeds 100 KLOCs (100,000 lines of code). What exactly does 100 KLOCs mean in everyday terms? I will answer this in a way I have done before: The book 'iWoz', the autobiography of Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, is a fairly typical book in terms of size. It has 30 lines of text per page and 342 pages. Therefore, if the whole of AstroDMx Capture was to be printed book fashion; to hold all of the lines of source code, it would require about 10 printed volumes, each the size of 'iWoz' to contain everything; 10 volumes for the code-base. In addition to the lines of code there is internal documentation (comments) that would require a couple of additional printed books to contain them and they are essential for the understanding of the code and future maintenance.

The Seagull and Rosette nebulae with Altair duo-band filters

The equipment used was an Altair Starwave ASCENT 60ED doublet refractor with field-flattener, a Pegasus FocusCube v2 focuser, an Altair Hypercam 533C 14 bit OSC CMOS camera and a PlayerOne Phoenix 2" filter wheel all mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount. An SVBONY SV165 guide scope with a natively connected QHY-5II-M guide camera was used for PHD2 multistar pulse auto-guiding via an INDI server. The mount, and focuser were controlled by AstroDMx Capture via the INDI server and the Altair Hypercam 533C and the PlayerOne Phoenix 2" filter wheel were controlled natively.

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The Equipment

Altair dual-band 2" S2O3 and HaO3 filters were used.

AstroDMx Capture running on an Ubuntu mini computer was used to capture 5-minute exposures through each filter of the Rosette nebula and C50 the Harp cluster as well as of the Seagull nebula IC2177. A total of 1hour 30minutes worth of data: 45 minutes through each filter were captured of each nebula.

Pixinsight was used to stack and calibrate the data. The data were further processed in PixInsight, GraXpert, SetiAstroSuitePro and Gimp3. The Ha, S2 and O3 channels were separated out from the HaO3 and S2O3 images and used to contruct narrowband palettes. Siril was used for pixelmath procedures.

The Seagull nebula IC2177

Hubble palette

HOS (Canada, France, Hawaii telescope palette: CFHT)

OSH

Pixelmath generated palettes

Gendler palette

ForaaX palette

The Rosette nebula and C50 the Harp cluster

Hubble palette

(Canada, France, Hawaii telescope palette: CFHT)

OSH

Pixelmath generated palettes

Gendler palette

ForaaX palette

The PlayerOne Phoenix 2" filter wheel was controlled natively by AstroDMx Capture and proved very useful for rapid filter change of the parfocal Altair 2" filters.

AstroPicsLab image processing software

Every so often I come across a piece of image processing software that I find meets its aims very well. Such a program is the freeware/donationware AstroPicsLab from Italy.

David Regordosa the developer of AstroPicsLab combines the two disciplines, of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Astronomy.

AstroPics Lab is an AI-powered tool designed to enhance amateur astrophotography.

AstroPics Lab (AL) aims to make it easy anyone who starts in the field of astrophotography to do some image processing.

AstroPics Lab doesn't claim or want to compete with the fantastic tools that already exist, it simply aims to make the work easier for those amateurs who do not have the time and money to process astronomical images with current tools.

The project is called (AL) (AstroPics Lab) in honor of the late physicist and meteorologist Albert Borras, director of the Pujalt Observatory for 16 years, co-founder of Astroanoia and Anoiameteo and science communicator.

AStroPicsLab can:

Remove noise, enhance objects, remove/reduce stars, apply colour automatically, upscale 2x image, intelligent crop, autostretch, luminance layers, change palette, modify colours, 3d effects, enhance stars, etc.

One of the key functionalities is a neural network trained on over 35000 images to remove a wide range of noise types (Gaussian, thermal, cosmic rays, salt‑and‑pepper, etc.) by processing 256 × 256-pixel blocks and reconstructing a clean, detailed result.

The image is divided into small blocks, on which the AI ​​model is applied to reduce noise. Finally, the blocks are put back together to create a final image without noise.

Also a Star Removal Model – Allows users to reduce or remove stars in images.

We shall illustrate the program by processing a high quality JPG image of the Iris nebula captured and stacked in a Seestar S50. It can also work on 16 bit files, PNG, FITS and TIFF. We are using the high quality JPG in this instance as this fits with the philosophy of the software and could make things easier for some Seestar users who don't want to go into stacking subframes in other software. Of course the program is equally well suited to working with stacked images from other imaging systems.

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AstroPicsLab has a variety of functions and processes which can be seen in this short animation.

Alternatively there is a completely automatic processing mode where the user can decide what will be included in the automatic workflow.

The Automatically enhanced image

If the Change View button is clicked the starless image is shown.

Or the Stars image is shown.

Any of the images can be saved.

The final result can be saved and if required, x2 upscaled before saving.

Animation of the before and after automatic processing of the Iris nebula

AstroPicsLab is a valuable addition to the arsenal of tools an astrophotographer can use to process her/his images.

The software can be downloaded from https://astropicslab.com/