Spacetime Pictures

You almost always see the Witch Head in one colour. It's a reflection nebula, so it glows blue by nature, dust catching the light of Rigel just off frame, and most versions lean all the way into that.

Gaëtan's take is richer than that, in two ways. First, the witch herself isn't just "blue", there's actual range in there, cooler and warmer blues, hints of brown where the dust thickens, the structure reading as a real cloud rather than a flat silhouette. And second, he didn't leave the background empty. There's Hα all through this field, the red haze the reflection nebula is usually shown floating in front of, and pulling it up gives the whole thing depth.

Available for the next 365 days on the first collaborative astrophotography platform.

💡 Filter by object type for the reflection nebulae

🗓️ Today's processing challenge:
#️⃣ SP_0287
📖 NGC 1909, the Witch Head (Eridanus)
🌈 HaLRGB
🌎 Backyard, Vosges, France
🔭 Canon 400mm f/2.8 L IS USM
⌛ 14.5h integration

Pass = unlimited master .fits to process 👉 spacetimepictures.com/datasets/SP_0287

🌌 Follow and enjoy our daily datasets.

Original astronomical data and processing by IRPhotomax

Some objects just have an aura, and LDN 1622, the Boogeyman, is one of them. A dark cloud in Orion that got its name because it genuinely looks like a figure lurking in the dark.

The easy move on a target like this is to lean on the Hα and let the whole frame go red, hydrogen shouting over everything. Gaëtan didn't: there's a full, strong LRGB underneath here, which means the colour isn't dominated by emission. You get the actual range of the scene, not just a red wash with a dark shape cut out of it.

It's a quieter, more natural read of a spooky object, and somehow that makes it spookier. Not lit up like a haunted house. Lit like the real dark, where the shape is only half-visible and you're not quite sure it isn't moving.

Available for the next 365 days on the first collaborative astrophotography platform.

💡 Filter by palette to compare the Hα-heavy takes on dark nebulae with the more balanced LRGB ones, this is a good example of what you gain by not letting the red run the show.

🗓️ Today's processing challenge:
#️⃣ SP_0286
📖 LDN 1622, the Boogeyman (Orion)
🌈 HaLRGB
🌎 Backyard, Vosges, France
🔭 TS Optics 300mm f/4.5 Newton
⌛ 34.75h integration

Pass = unlimited master .fits to process 👉 spacetimepictures.com/datasets/SP_0286

🌌 Follow and enjoy our daily datasets.

Original astronomical data and processing by IRPhotomax

Have you ever processed an APOD? Because you can, right now, with this one.

This is M17, the Swan, and Gaëtan Maxant's data on it was NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on 29 August 2024. Almost 19 hours from his terrace in Dounoux, an object that barely clears the horizon from where he is, so he squeezed in every clear minute he could over a month.

Here's what gets me about that. The finished image is out there in the world, it had its day on the NASA front page, it's "done" in the way a famous photograph is done. But the raw material behind it, the actual masters, the real light Gaëtan collected on those nights, is sitting right here for anyone to open and rework. That feels a bit like being handed the negatives of a well-known historical photograph and being told: here, make your own print.

You're not looking at someone else's finished picture and admiring it. You're starting where they started, same photons, blank canvas, and you get to decide what M17 looks like this time. The APOD version is one interpretation. Yours would be another, from the exact same night on a terrace in eastern France.

Available for the next 365 days on the first collaborative astrophotography platform.

💡 The APOD is linked in Gaëtan's dataset notes if you want to see where this data ended up, then open the masters and take it somewhere new.

🗓️ Today's processing challenge:
#️⃣ SP_0285
📖 M17, the Swan / Omega (Sagittarius)
🌈 RGBHaOIII
🌎 Backyard, Dounoux, France
🔭 TS Optics 300mm f/4.5 Newton
⌛ 18.9h integration

Pass = unlimited master .fits to process 👉 spacetimepictures.com/datasets/SP_0285

🌌 Follow and enjoy our daily datasets.

Original astronomical data and processing by IRPhotomax

Ou4, the Giant Squid, is brutal to shoot. This version is nearly 27 hours of OIII alone from a Bortle 6 backyard. Serious commitment already.

But...we now have four separate datasets that include this object, four different people, four different scopes, all sampled somewhere between 1 and 3 arcseconds per pixel, which means they're compatible, close enough to register onto each other and stack.

So nothing stops someone downloading all four and combining them into one synthetic master. Add it up and you're looking at something like 150 hours on the Squid. Someone could assemble a monster integration in an afternoon that they never had to spend a night acquiring.

We don't know if anyone will bother. But the fact that the raw material is stacked up and ready is kind of the whole point of this place.

Available for the next 365 days on the first collaborative astrophotography platform.

💡 Search by object name to pull up all four Squid datasets, and see how deep a combined stack could go.

🗓️ Today's processing challenge:
#️⃣ SP_0281
📖 Ou4, the Giant Squid (Cepheus)
🌈 HaOIII
🌎 Backyard, Slovenia
🔭 Lacerta 8" f/4 Photonewton
⌛ 37.5h integration

Pass = unlimited master .fits to process 👉 spacetimepictures.com/datasets/SP_0281

🌌 Follow and enjoy our daily datasets.

Original astronomical data and processing by Peter Komatović

How do people frame a nebula this faint, this well?

Because Sh2-96 is barely there. On a single raw sub it's basically nothing, a grey field with a few stars and, if you're lucky, the faintest ghost. You cannot see this thing at the eyepiece. You cannot really see it on the screen while you're shooting either. And yet Jeff Ratino has it composed beautifully, the scarlet "A" of gas rising out of the top, the cooler blue washing across the bottom, the whole thing balanced like he could see exactly what he was pointing at.

Framing a target this dim is basically flying blind: you punch in coordinates from a survey, you trust the numbers left behind by people who ventured out to that patch of sky before you, and you commit hours of exposure to a composition you won't actually be able to judge until the data's stacked and stretched days later. It's navigation by instruments, the way a pilot flies through cloud with no horizon, believing the dials instead of their eyes. You line up on faith and coordinates, and you find out afterward if you nailed it.

Available for the next 365 days on the first collaborative astrophotography platform.

💡 Use our powerful Search engine at the top!

🗓️ Today's processing challenge:
#️⃣ SP_0284
📖 Sh2-96, the Scarlet Letter (Cygnus)
🌈 RGBHaOIII
🌎 Remote, Starfront Observatories, TX
🔭 Stellarvue SVX102T
⌛ 29h integration

Pass = unlimited master .fits to process 👉 spacetimepictures.com/datasets/SP_0284

🌌 Follow and enjoy our daily datasets.

Original astronomical data and processing by Jeff Ratino