This project is a submission for the astrophotography gallery here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1390424411/. @NOAH2026SCHOOL or anybody else wanting to add these images to a gallery, I encourage you to look through all of this thoroughly. These are some of my best pictures, most of them are took with my 6" SCT telescope and my phone. The exceptions are the last two images the ones of the Pleiades and the Belt or Orion which i took with a Nikon D40 during twilight. Please note that I have added the date each image was took, and for some, explicit warnings if it is in approximate true human-eye color or if it is exaggerated or further processed color. If you have any questions regarding the true colors of any of my astronomical images or objects in space, feel more than free to consult me, I am experienced. Also note that some of these pictures are long exposures, some are short exposures, and for the planetary work, it's a video stacked into an image that I then processed further using special software to reveal subtle details already present in the image (wavelet sharpening is a big way to do this) and correct colors to make the image more beautiful or scientifically interesting (in my opinion they are scientifically interesting to say, these pictures aren't being studied by actual scientists lol)
Descriptions of each image: 1. this Mercury image was took during dusk right near the horizon, so it appeared golden, which is not the planet's true color. I simply white-balanced this issue away. It appears as a elongated shape because Mercury was in a gibbous phase when I captured this. 2. This is a more recent image I took, and it's of Venus. I'm only calling it "True Color" here because I didn't really do much edits to the color of the image, but it was low to the horizon, so real Venus probably looks more white from space than is shown in this image. Venus appears as a crescent phase here, roughly 25% illuminated as seen from Earth. 3. This is a picture of the moon I took basically. I white-balanced it and increased saturation to reveal subtle hues in the rock. 4. This is a much older picture of the Moon I took that achieved quite sharp resolution, despite being imaged in broad daylight (that's why the background is blue!) 5. This is a heavily processed stack of the planet Mars. The red frame was kind of trash, so this is actually a GGB image instead of a RGB image. It's also white-balanced. But you can clearly see the large north polar cap and other surface features on the planet, however fuzzy. 6. This is a stack of Jupiter in which I have barely even touched the color at all and simply did wavelet sharpening on the stack, which means this image should closely approximate the true colors of Jupiter. The black dot is the shadow from its moon Io. 7. This is the same Jupiter stack processed more heavily, in a similar manner to how most Jupiter images online look. It is not what you would see if you were actually looking at Jupiter *at all*. The upside of this is that it lets you see the fainter hues and details of the planet much more easily, in fact right above the GRS, directly to the right of Io's black shadow, you may see a small little yellowish dot. That is Io itself as it appears over Jupiter's cloud tops from Earth's perspective. 8. This is a stack of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. I'm hesitant to say I resolved surface features on Ganymede simply because it is so small, but 1. the math checks out, it is physically possible for my telescope (Ganymede can be ~1.8" wide in the sky, my telescope can resolve down to ~0.8") and 2. I don't know how else to explain the lighter and darker regions shown pretty clearly in the final stack. These colors are not true color because I have enhanced them and white-balanced them, plus there's atmospheric dispersion making the colors more like than they would be from space, but I'm just happy I got an image of Ganymede as a world rather than a white speck that cannot be resolved. 9. This is a true color stack of Saturn. Like , I have not touched the color, just done wavelet sharpening. The astronomical seeing on this night was pretty good so the Cassini division is easily visible on both ring ansae, and it was also near opposition, so the rings appear brighter here due to the Seeliger effect. 10. This is the same Saturn stack but enhanced, the same way I did with Jupiter on . I will emphasize that this is not true color. I white-balanced and increased saturation on this image to reveal subtle hue and saturation shifts present in the original image that are hard to pick out with the human eye. 11. This is a stack of the planet Uranus in roughly true color. It's an older image, and I remember it was took with a white-balance of 5,000 K. 12. This is a stack of the planet Neptune, took on the same night as was with the same white-balance (5,000 K) to see if Neptune was truly a royal blue or it it really was the same color as Uranus. The result speaks for itself I believe. 13. This is a single exposure of the Triangulum galaxy. It is very bad, but it does show the spiral arms barely, so I count it as a success. My telescope wasn't tracking super accurately, so it appears blurred. 14. This is an HDR of the Orion Nebula. It's a decent photo, although I think I used far too low of a white-balance. 15. This is a terrible photo of the Whirlpool Galaxy. My telescope could not track for long enough to get a long exposure, so I had to get a very short grainy exposure then attempt to pull the galaxy out of the grain, but even then apparently it could not handle tracking for even a short exposure because you can clearly see the stars are double-lobed disasters. Still, it is the only photo I have of the galaxy, and it's good enough to see the spiral arms, the central core, and it's merging companion, so it's technically a success, even if it sucks. 16. This is a picture of the Pleiades star cluster I captured. Instead of every other image in this catalogue so far, which was took with my phone held up to the eyepiece of my 6" SCT, this image was took simply with my Nikon D40 propped up on a "silent drum" (terrible product, btw, the whole point of a drum is to not be silent) to act as a makeshift tripod. 17. Basically the same thing as , but Orion.
