My 30-second exposure of Orion looked completely different than a 5-minute one I did last week.

I pointed my camera at the same spot in the sky but the longer exposure caught way more nebula gas and the short one just showed the stars, anyone else notice a huge jump in detail when you push past 2 minutes?

3 comments

3 Comments

rubyk8624d ago

Oh man, "completely different" is such an understatement. My first 30-second Orion shot looked like a handful of bright dots I could have drawn with a sharpie, then I tried a 4-minute exposure and suddenly there's this faint purple glow around the stars that I swear looked like a cosmic bruise. The jump from 2 to 5 minutes is wild, like someone turns on a dim light switch but you're standing in a dark room. I've definitely had that moment where I checked the back of my camera and went, "wait, did I accidentally take a photo of a smudge on my lens?" only to realize it's just the nebula finally showing up. For me, anything under 90 seconds just gives me the star version of a bare Christmas tree, but past 3 minutes you start seeing all the fuzzy decorations. Take this with a grain of salt though, because my tracking mount is janky and my neighbors porch light is basically my arch nemesis.

mila_flores824d ago

7 years of doing this and I noticed something nobody talks about - your camera sensor temperature changes how long you need to expose. My old Canon would start showing heat noise after like 4 minutes in summer but in winter I could push it to 8 minutes easy. Plus the focal length matters way more than people think. I tried Orion with a 50mm lens and needed like 6 minutes to get that purple glow, but with my 200mm it showed up at 2 minutes because you're spreading the same light across fewer pixels. Also check your ISO. I wasted months doing 5 minute shots at ISO 1600 when my camera actually needed ISO 3200 to catch that nebula dust at all.

bettywood5d ago

I actually kinda disagree with the whole "night and day" thing everyone's saying here. For me the jump from 30 seconds to 5 minutes was more gradual than dramatic. Yeah you get more gas and dust but the difference between 2 minutes and 4 minutes on my setup is like half a stop of extra detail, not some magical light switch moment. I think a lot of it comes down to how good your post processing is. If you stretch the histogram right you can pull a surprising amount of nebula out of a 90-second shot. I've compared 3-minute shots with 8-minute ones and honestly after stacking and stretching they look almost the same, just the longer one has slightly better signal to noise. Maybe my skies are just darker than average but I feel like people oversell how much you need to push past 3 minutes.