Seeking dark skies, we set up camp near Laksvatn on the Ullsfjorden, outside of Tromsø. The lights, initially dim and sputtering, blazed across the sky in a powerful display after twenty minutes.

Plagued by technical issues in 2024, I turned to "sacrificial targets" like the Eastern Veil Nebula to troubleshoot, never planning to make an image from them.

Each image goes through nearly a hundred different revisions spanning years in some cases. These are just a handful of the "final" versions of the Andromeda Galaxy. Not shown here are the countless other reprocessed versions that didn't make the cut to disk and are lost to the sands of times.

Three hundred images taken over six nights, along with roughly a week's worth of processing, is what it took to produce this single image of the Soul Nebula. This article will walk through a high-level step-by-step guide to turn those individual black-and-white images into this final image.

In July of 2022, I took around five hours' worth of LRGB images of Messier 45, known as The Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. The Pleiades is one of the closest and brightest celestial objects we can see from Earth with our naked eyes.