I’m excited to share my biggest project so far: the complete Messier Catalog.

Over the past 7 months, I captured all 110 Messier objects, processed them (more than once…), and even built a custom tool to assemble this final mosaic.

All objects are shown at the same scale — each tile is a 600×600px crop at the native resolution of the Seestar S30 (~40′ × 40′ field of view).

The journey

In August 2025, I bought a Seestar S30… and lost my job the very same day.
I almost cancelled the order — I’m really glad I didn’t.

Starting from scratch, I had everything to learn: planning, acquisition, and processing. But I also had something invaluable — time.

At first, I tracked my progress using a simple Messier chart from Wikipedia. But I quickly wanted something more visual and motivating, so I started developing AstroCatalog, a tool that automatically places images onto a customizable grid. Watching the catalog fill up tile by tile was incredibly satisfying.

In December, I discovered PixInsight. After trying it, I went back and reprocessed the entire dataset to achieve a more consistent look — especially matching background levels across all objects.

I also committed to keeping a uniform scale, which added an extra challenge for framing and composition across such different targets.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally captured the last missing objects.

I hope you enjoy exploring this catalog as much as I enjoyed building it 😃