c/astronomy-photos

The night I spent 4 hours stacking lunar shots and forgot the flats

I was out in my backyard in Tucson last Saturday trying to get a clean shot of the moon through my 8 inch SCT. After capturing over 300 frames and spending 3 hours in Autostakkert, I realized I never took any flat frames to fix the vignetting from my focal reducer. Ended up having to redo the whole session the next night, which took another 2 hours just for the flats alone. Has anyone else wasted a full evening forgetting one simple calibration step?

2 comments

henrycooper•1d ago

The $30 light pollution filter I wrote off for two years actually works

I kept seeing these cheap CLS filters online and figured they were a gimmick. Finally grabbed one last month for my DSLR and shot the Orion Nebula from my backyard in Atlanta. First image had way more detail than anything I'd pulled without it. Has anyone else had luck with these on city skies?

2 comments

tara_jones94•2d ago

Showerthought: Every photo of the moon is technically a time capsule

I was messing with my phone camera trying to get a clear shot of the moon last week, and it hit me. Light takes about 1.3 seconds to travel from the moon to Earth. So when you snap a picture, you're seeing the moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago. That's not much, but compare that to photos of Andromeda galaxy where that light started its journey 2.5 million years ago. It made me think twice about what "now" really means in those deep space shots you see on this sub. Has anyone else thought about how the time delay changes how you look at certain photos?

2 comments

phoenix_thompson4•3d ago

Why does nobody talk about how stacked JPEGs ruin deep space nebula shots

I spent 6 months stacking my Orion Nebula photos as JPEGs because that's what every tutorial on YouTube shows. Saved them as TIFFs one night on a whim after reading some old forum post from like 2007. The difference is insane. All that extra data in the dark areas just appears. My stacked TIFF showed way more of the Horsehead Nebula's dust lanes than any JPEG stack ever did. Took me 30 minutes to reprocess one night and the result was way better than all those months of JPEG work. Has anyone else noticed how much detail you lose with compressed formats in stacking?

c/astronomy-photos

The night I spent 4 hours stacking lunar shots and forgot the flats

The $30 light pollution filter I wrote off for two years actually works

Showerthought: Every photo of the moon is technically a time capsule

Why does nobody talk about how stacked JPEGs ruin deep space nebula shots

Took me 3 years to realize I was stacking my star photos wrong

Can we talk about how stacked Hubble vs Webb images actually compare

Stacked vs single exposure for deep sky images - which is actually better?

PSA: My lens fogged up during a meteor shower shoot and I lost half the frames

Went to the McDonald Observatory last weekend and the light pollution was way worse than I expected

Why does nobody talk about how much money star trackers can waste?

That moment at a star party when a 10 year old showed me my telescope was out of collimation and I felt like a complete rookie

Hot take: I used to think stacking multiple long exposures was just showing off technique

Nearly dumped my telescope off a cliff in Big Bend

Had a weird moment at Joshua Tree last weekend looking up at the stars

Dropped $150 on a star tracker that I barely use now

My moon photos kept looking like garbage no matter what I did

Just figured out how stacking photos works for astronomy shots

Hit 500 upvotes on a photo of a blurry nebula

Just realized how much I spent on telescope upgrades over the years

Critique on my moon shots completely changed my approach

Debate: should astrophotographers edit their photos or leave them raw?

Totally different seeing the Milky Way now compared to 10 years ago

PSA: My telescope mount failed during the Orion nebula shot last night

My buddy at the Griffith Observatory cleared up a big misconception I had about star colors

I used to think stacking photos was just for the pros