Our first picture in Bortle 1 skies... North American Nebula (Harry Karamitsos)

Our first picture in Bortle 1 skies... North American Nebula

A funny story about this picture… Nick and I visited New Mexico for the first time. We had bought a property unseen in a Bortle 1 sky area and we went to check it out. We figured we could try some imaging while we were there... I had used my ASI Air with the WO Flourostar 91 on an AM5 mount in New York a number of times before we took it to New Mexico. The Air would plate solve and find something like 30-80 stars on a good night. I knew the system worked fine.We had set everything up but we couldn’t get the guider to work. Ok we figured we would do unguided 60 second subs…We tried to polar align - but the Air couldn’t plate solve. We couldn’t understand why! We tried it 7 times an every time the plate solving would fail.We were devastated! We couldn’t believe out luck! The Milky Way was so bright, we could navigate by starlight (seriously) yet we couldn't even polar align!Finally on the 8th try the Air did the plate solve and stated that it saw 26,643 stars. No wonder it failed all those times. It looked up and said “there are too many stars, can’t figure out where I am looking…”

Finally we took this picture. It's terrible. the backfocus is off, the stars are almost square, but we couldn't be happier.

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9860411
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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