About

I'm Akash Deep, and this is my running record of learning to process astrophotography from the ground up. I'm based in Lubbock, Texas — flat West-Texas horizons, dry skies more nights than not, and enough ambient light to make every photo a small argument with the background gradient.

The point of this site is to document my progress honestly: every post has a before/after slider so the phone's raw JPG sits next to whatever I managed to pull out of it. If a night produced something boring or broken, I'll try to keep it here anyway, because the failures are where the learning lives.

Gear

• Google Pixel 9 Pro XL — Night Mode for long single-frame exposures; occasional tripod; no tracker, no telescope.

This list will grow as I grow. For now it's honest.

Workflow

1. Scout a dark-ish patch of sky, check the moon phase and forecast.
2. Shoot in Night Mode — usually one long exposure, sometimes a few to compare.
3. Pull the JPG into Siril for background extraction, histogram stretching, and color calibration.
4. Finish with fine saturation and crop in whatever editor is closest to hand.
5. Write the post, drop the files in the right folder, push to GitHub.

Contact

Site source: github.com/akashdeepo/astrophotography.