Wednesday, September 3, 2025

The Lagoon Nebula with the Seestar S50

This is probably the best image of the Lagoon Nebula I have ever taken. The Lagoon is a tough object for me as my southern horizon is mostly tall trees. I also live in a large city--about a mile and a half from downtown in Bortle 8/9 skies. I do have daughter who lives in Indiana and I took the S50 with me on a recent visit. I'm glad I did. She has Bortle 5 skies and conditions were excellent for imaging. This pic is a crop of the nebula. The image has a total of 1.5 hours of integration time. It was stacked and stretched in Siril, with star processing also in Siril. I processed the resulting image in Cosmic Clarity, and tweaked it in Affinity and Photoshop. I'm amazed at the detail the Seestar was able to pull out. I kept saturation and brightness low in order to show the maximum detail, which washes out on a brighter image. EDIT--just added another version of this image, with the gradient fixed in Graxpert.

The Lagoon Nebula with the Seestar S50

This is probably the best image of the Lagoon Nebula I have ever taken. The Lagoon is a tough object for me as my southern horizon is mostly...