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Snapped my 6th straight clear night on M42 and a guy at the club meeting said one thing that stuck
Went to the local astronomy club meetup in Boulder last Thursday and I was showing off my latest stack of the Orion Nebula, 140 frames of 45 seconds each on a stock DSLR, and feeling pretty good about how the core came out without blowing out. This older guy named Ray looked at it for a bit and just said "you're shooting for pretty, not for true." At first I got a little defensive lol. But then he pulled up his own version of the same target and pointed out how my histogram was clipping and I'd lost a bunch of faint dust that was actually there in the data. Turns out I'd been stretching too hard in editing to make it pop for Instagram and butchering the faint stuff in the process. So the small win is that I went back and reprocessed the same subs with a lighter hand, and you can actually see the outer wisps around the trapezium now. Anyone else ever get humbled by a throwaway comment at a star party or club night like that?
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thomasb241mo ago
Man, come on, Ray sounds like the guy who tells you your BBQ is wrong because it isn't "authentic." Pretty IS the point for most of us shooting a stock DSLR from a light polluted backyard. If you'd chased every last wisp of dust, your shot might have looked like gray mud on a phone screen, and nobody at the club would have stopped to look at it in the first place. The core not blowing out at 45 seconds on 140 frames is a real skill, so don't let one grumpy comment talk you out of an edit people actually want to see.
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