It's Nebula Season, BABY! 🌌

Scratch any amateur astrophotographer and underneath you’ll find a person sitting anxiously, waiting for the nights to close in and the nebula-rich skies to rise high above the horizon.

Yesterday was the autumnal equinox.

It’s now getting dark at roughly 8pm and staying that way until around 5am. That’s a solid 9–10 hours of darkness, and it’s only going to get longer!

So while the shelves in the shops are already being filled with Christmas goods (WAY too early), astrophotographers everywhere are already singing:

TIS THE SEASON!

As some of you may know, I’ve spent the better part of 2026 upgrading GG, my astrophotography rig, so that I can spend those longer nights getting better exposures, better focus, better guiding…

…and, I’ll say the quiet part out loud…

STAYING WARMER!

Yesterday, on the equinox, the astro-gods decided to favour us with clear skies, so I ventured outside with hopes bubbling.

There were actually two reasons for going out.

Number 1: I wanted to. And I was going to anyway.

Number 2: I had a target in mind.

Some friends of mine are getting married in November, and I wanted to create something a little more original than the usual dinnerware or holiday fund contribution.

I showed them a catalogue of nebulae that I could potentially capture from the back garden, and they chose the Iris Nebula.

An excellent choice, if I say so myself.

So, for the past month or so, I’ve been planning this session. But, naturally, it wasn’t without its problems.

Because apparently astrophotography is not allowed to be straightforward.

Problem No. 1: The Moon 🌕

Yeah.

Not much I can do about that.

With the number of clear skies we get in the UK, and especially here in the North West, of course I was going to take advantage of one when it appeared.

Beggars can’t be choosers.

For those of you thinking, “What has he got against the Moon?”

Absolutely nothing.

Except that it’s a bugger to photograph faint deep-sky objects when you have essentially got a giant mirror beaming sunlight across the night sky.

We need darkness.

Thankfully, the Moon was sitting in the south while my target was in the opposite direction, so I was hoping I could get away with it.

As I’m writing this, I’m processing the image with fingers, toes and probably several other body parts crossed that it hasn’t completely washed everything out.

Problem No. 2: Guidance 🤬

I had an absolute ‘mare last night.

Thankfully, only for a small part of the session.

Ever since I mounted my power box, I’ve had random fluctuations with my guiding system. Sometimes it’s been unusable. Sometimes moderately irritating.

Last night, I got the full bloody buffet.

It started out fine. The odd tweak on the RA (right ascension), but overall it was running around 1.25 arcseconds, which I was perfectly happy with.

Then it started creeping up.

2 arcseconds.

Then 3.

I thought I spotted the problem: a stiff cable that appeared to be catching against the mount body.

I moved it.

The guiding seemed to settle.

Excellent.

Problem solved.

Obviously not.

Because after performing a meridian flip, the guiding decided to completely lose the plot.

DEC started heading north.

RA started wandering south.

Nothing I did seemed to bring it back together.

So I did what any self-respecting astrophotographer would do.

I shouted at it and turned it off and on again.

It worked!

For about a minute.

Then came the dreaded message:

“You need to calibrate.”

I shouted some more.

Then clicked the button.

And…

It actually worked.

For real this time.

Unfortunately, looking at the timestamps on my images, the whole episode cost me about 45 minutes of imaging time.

But hey.

What’s life without a few problems?

Problem No. 3: SIRIL 💻

As I’m writing this, I’ve been home from work for a few hours.

I’ve had a cuppa, washed the dishes and then tried to process this damned picture in SIRIL.

Unfortunately, my main laptop is absolutely stuffed with data, so I’ve had to run everything from an external hard drive.

And it has taken over an hour to process.

It’s still going…

Oh wait…

It’s just stopped.

Hang on.

I need to check.

…

I’m back.

It’s…

OK, I think.

I need to play with it a bit more.

I was expecting to see more of those lovely clouds of nebulosity, but at the moment they’re not really jumping out at me.

I’m hoping that once I get into the background extraction and proper processing, I’ll be able to pull more of it out.

We’ll see what we can do.

That’s half the fun of this ridiculous hobby, after all.

You spend hours freezing your backside off in the garden, fighting cables, arguing with computers and watching graphs you barely understand…

…and then you spend another few hours trying to convince a faint grey smudge to become a nebula.

And occasionally…

it works.

So keep an eye on the gallery over the next few days for the finished Iris Nebula.

I’m also hoping to get a YouTube video out of this session.

I haven’t made one of those in a while…

…and considering the amount of nonsense that happened last night, I’ve probably got enough material.