c/astronomy-photos

Stacked my phone shots against a cheap tracker and the difference was ridiculous

Last Saturday I went out to this dark spot near the river with my tripod and took maybe 50 stacked exposures of Orion. Thought they looked decent on the back of the camera. Then my buddy showed up with a used Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer he got for $150 and took a single 2 minute tracked shot. The detail in the nebula was like comparing a blurry photo to a clear one. Made me wonder if I should just save for a tracker instead of spending more time on stacking software. Has anyone else made the switch from untracked to a basic tracker and seen that big a jump?

Had the worst luck with astrophotography last Tuesday night

I finally got a clear forecast for a change so I drove 45 minutes out to the dark sky spot near Jasper. Set everything up, did my polar alignment, got the framing perfect on the Orion Nebula. Then ten minutes into the first 3-minute sub, this random car pulls up with their high beams on and just sits there for 20 minutes. By the time they left, clouds rolled in from nowhere and I had to pack it all up after only getting 4 usable frames. Has anyone else had a perfect night ruined by one random thing like that?

Stood under a dark sky in eastern Oregon last night and finally saw the Milky Way core with my own eyes

I've seen a million photos of it but nothing prepared me for how massive and bright it looked just hanging there above the desert. Has anyone else had that moment where a picture totally undersells the real thing?

Just wasted $230 on a cursed solar filter adapter ring

Ordered a custom 3D printed adapter ring from a guy on Etsy for my 8 inch Dobsonian to fit a specific solar filter. Took 6 weeks to arrive and it was 2mm too narrow, totally useless for the eclipse last month. Had to watch the whole event through a pinhole projector I built from a cereal box. Has anyone else dealt with custom astro parts that didn't fit?

I always thought stacking multiple exposures was cheating, then I tried it on a nebula shot last night

Crossed 500 deep sky shots last night and it finally clicked

I've been stacking and processing astro photos for like 3 years now and hit image 500 last night. That one shot of M51 was the first time I actually felt like my noise reduction and color calibration were totally right. How long did it take you before your edits started looking pro?

Finally caught the Orion Nebula after 3 cloudy weeks in a row

Last Tuesday the skies finally cleared up around 11pm and I managed to get a solid 45 minute exposure stack before the moon rose. Has anyone else dealt with losing like a month of imaging time to weather?

Took me 18 months to figure out my telescope's finder scope was mounted upside down

I kept wondering why every photo of M31 had the core in a different spot than my viewfinder, then a kid at a star party casually mentioned it and I felt like a total idiot, anyone else have a dumb setup mistake that took forever to catch?

Cheap tracker vs star adventurer for wide field shots?

Tbh I had to choose between a $150 barn door tracker I built myself and dropping $500 on a used Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer. I went with the DIY barn door for my first 3 months of shooting the Milky Way with a 50mm lens on my Canon. Honestly it worked okay for 30 second exposures but anything longer than 45 seconds and stars were trailing bad. After saving up I grabbed the Star Adventurer last month and the difference is night and day. I'm getting clean 2 minute exposures now with no trails. Has anyone else seen big jumps jumping from a cheap tracker to a proper one? I'm wondering if I should've just waited and bought the good one first.

Pro tip: stacking your moon shots with free software changed everything

I spent months trying to get a sharp photo of the moon through my basic telescope, always ending up with blurry edges. Then I read about taking a video instead of a single photo and stacking the frames in a free program called AutoStakkert. It sorted through hundreds of frames and picked only the sharp ones, then combined them into one crisp image. The difference was night and day, my wife even asked if I bought a new lens. Has anyone else tried stacking for planets like Jupiter or Saturn?

I was totally Wrong about those 'overprocessed' Hubble images

For years I rolled my eyes at the super colorful Hubble photos. Thought it was fake, like they were just painting space. Then I watched a talk by the imaging lead at STScI where she showed the raw data files vs the final image. The colors come from different wavelengths like oxygen and hydrogen lines. They assign visible colors to invisible light so we can actually SEE the science. Felt like a dummy after that. Has anyone else had that 'aha' moment with processed astrophotography?

That moment I realized Mars was actually moving in my photos...

I was comparing a photo I took back in July from my backyard in Tucson to one I snapped last week, and I thought my tripod had shifted because the red dot was way off. Turns out Mars just does that... it traveled almost 40 degrees across the sky in those 4 months because Earth caught up to it or something. Has anyone else been fooled by planetary motion like this?

Hit 10,000 stacked astrophotos last night and it felt weird

I was just organizing my hard drive and noticed I've stacked 10,000 individual frames of the Orion Nebula over the last three years. Didn't set out to hit any number, it just added up from all those clear nights. Kind of wild to think each one was a separate 30 second exposure where I was outside in the cold. Has anyone else had a random milestone like this sneak up on them?

Stop calling every blurry dot a deep sky object

I saw someone post a picture of Mars last week labeled as the Orion Nebula. The planet was the only bright thing in the frame, no nebula anywhere. How do you mistake a solid disk for a gas cloud?

Rant: That one perfect night at Cherry Springs vs. a whole week of clouds

I drove 3 hours to Cherry Springs State Park last Tuesday and got the clearest shot of the Andromeda Galaxy I've ever taken. Stacked 120 frames and you could see every dust lane clear as day. But the week before that at my usual spot near Harrisburg? Six straight nights of high clouds ruining every single image I tried to capture. Which do you guys think is worse: getting one amazing night that sets the bar too high, or dealing with a string of bad weather that makes you question your hobby?

Spent 4 hours fighting a tripod mount that just would not lock

Ngl I almost threw my camera bag into a ditch last night. I was out near the old quarry trying to get a clean shot of the Andromeda galaxy and my tripod head kept slipping like a full centimeter every time I tightened it down. I figured it was my fault for not tightening enough so I kept adjusting but after like 45 minutes of that I started checking the actual locking mechanism. Turns out the rubber grip on the tightening knob had worn down so smooth I could barely get any torque on it. I wasted another hour trying to rig something with a rubber band from my glovebox which obviously failed. Then I drove into town to grab some pliers from my buddy's garage but his wife had borrowed them. By the time I got back the moon was rising and the sky was washing out. Honestly I gave up and just packed it in after 4 total hours of messing around. Has anyone else had a tripod part just go bad on you out of nowhere like that?

Noticed a bunch of astro photos getting the moon reflection wrong

I was scrolling through the subreddit last night and kept seeing people post shots of a lake or ocean at night with a perfect moon reflection. The thing is, the reflection line was straight up and down like a mirror. But in real life, the reflection on water actually spreads out horizontally when the moon is low on the horizon. I only figured this out because I stood on a dock near my house in Tampa Bay last month and stared at it for like 20 minutes. Am I the only one who gets bugged by this detail in photos?

Tried stacking my astro photos for the first time last night and it blew my mind

I've been taking single shots of the moon for months and thought stacking was just extra work for no real gain. But I saw a tutorial from a guy in Arizona who showed his raw vs stacked Jupiter and I had to try it. Took 200 frames of the Orion Nebula with my 8 inch dob and used DeepSkyStacker. The detail in the dust clouds was insane, I could actually see colors I never knew were there. Anyone else find that stacking changes your whole approach to what equipment you think you need?

Just realized I've been stacking my astro photos wrong for three years

Back in 2021, I started using the 'sigma clipping' method in DeepSkyStacker because every tutorial said it was best for removing satellites. Last week, I compared a stack from that to a simple 'average' on the same Orion data from my backyard in Tucson, and the average looked sharper with less noise. Has anyone else found the fancy stacking methods actually make things worse sometimes?

Appreciation post: My Orion Nebula shot just got 500 likes on AstroBin. Never thought I'd hit that.

Can we talk about how light pollution is changing what we can even see?

I was trying to show my nephew the Milky Way from my backyard in Austin last month, and we could barely make out a faint smudge. I used to see it clearly there 10 years ago. What's the darkest sky you've been able to get a decent photo from lately?

Tbh I just learned from a documentary that the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image contains about 10,000 galaxies in a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length, which is a wild thing to think about.

Honestly, I was just watching a space doc on my couch last night and that stat made me put my snack down and just stare at the screen for a minute.

DAE spend an entire night trying to get a single clear shot of the Orion Nebula only to realize your focus was off by a hair?

I was out in my backyard in Boise for 6 hours last Saturday, freezing my butt off, stacking what I thought were great frames, only to find every single one was slightly blurry because I didn't double-check the bahtinov mask on my 8" Dobsonian.

Back in 2010, I had to pick between a cheap webcam and a proper CCD for my first Saturn photo.

I went with the CCD, and after three nights of fighting with the software, I finally got a grainy but real image of the rings, which felt way better than a blurry webcam shot would have. Anyone have tips for cleaning up old noisy data from early gear?

I finally listened when a guy in the forum told me my star trails were 'too perfect' and looked fake, so I started leaving in a few small tracking errors and a bit of natural sky gradient on purpose.

Has anyone else found that a little bit of 'noise' or imperfection actually makes an astrophoto feel more real and less like a computer graphic?