Working on Pacman and Soul Nebulae

We’ve had some clear skies lately, and I’ve decided to try MegaStack along with the other tools. I was planning to get M 103 while waiting for the Soul to get above the neighbors’ house, but the Pacman Nebula seems better now.

The first day’s results for the Pacman, screen capture from the night of August 16, 2025.

You can see I didn’t avoid the neighbors’ house altogether. MegaStack to the rescue! Here it is restacked the next morning:

And here it is run through StellarStudio auto and cropped in Photos:

Next, we try the Soul Nebula:

Even though it didn’t have as obvious of a problem as the Pacman, I still manually deleted some bad subs:

And here’s StellarStudio auto:

Night number two, August 19/20. I’ve started using SkySafari in AR mode, to see if/when things will be visible from a particular spot. I thought that 9:30pm would be okay for the Pacman, since it looked like it would be just over the neighbors’ house, but I was wrong.

The compass on my iPhone isn’t all that accurate. I should take off my PopSocket magnetic case and calibrate it before I depend on it. Anyway, here is a screen from when I’m about to delete 54 subs:

And here is a MegaStack of the last two sessions, processed via StellarStudio auto:

Here is last night’s observations of the Soul Nebula:

I manually picked 21 subs to delete:

The restacking takes quite a while. Here is two days’ worth of data, processed in StellarStudio auto: