c/astronomy-photos

Finally captured the Orion Nebula after 3 years of trying

Drove out to Cherry Springs last weekend and saw someone using their phone flashlight to try and photograph the Milky Way

I get it, we all start somewhere but this guy was holding his phone up to his telescope eyepiece and wondering why the pics were blurry. I tried to help him out but he insisted his method was better. Spent like 20 minutes watching him get frustrated. Has anyone else run into people at dark sky spots who just refuse to take advice?

Just caught a 6 month difference in my moon shots

I've been taking photos of the moon from my backyard in Portland since January. I pulled up my first attempt from February and compared it to one from last night. The early one was all fuzzy with no crater detail, but now I can actually see the edges of Mare Tranquillitatis clearly. Turns out learning how to stack images properly made all the difference. What was the one technique that changed your astro photos the most?

Unpopular pick for editing aurora shots: I actually prefer GIMP over Photoshop

I spent three weeks processing my Alaska trip photos from February, and I ended up sticking with GIMP because the layer masking just clicked for me. Has anyone else found an open source tool that beats the paid stuff for astro work?

DAE spend six months thinking their telescope was broken before realizing...

I picked up a used Orion 8 inch Dobsonian about a year ago and for the first six months I thought the mirror was just scratched or something. Every time I tried to look at Jupiter all I got was this fuzzy, shapeless blob that didn't look anything like the photos I saw here. I was about to sell the thing when a guy at a star party in Flagstaff asked me if I had let the scope cool down first. Turns out I was dragging it straight from my 70 degree apartment out into 40 degree desert air and immediately trying to look at planets. The heat wave off the mirror was basically ruining every single view. I felt like a complete idiot but now that I let it sit outside for 45 minutes before observing, Jupiter looks crisp enough to see bands and the Great Red Spot. Has anyone else gone months blaming bad equipment for user error?

Pro tip: get the moon phase wrong ONCE and your whole week of deep sky shots is toast

I had this unbelievable stretch last October where the weather cleared up for 5 nights in a row at Cherry Springs. First night I went after Andromeda and got some of my cleanest data ever. Then I realized I didn't check the moon calendar for day 3 - it was a full moon washing out everything through the weekend. Ended up with 2 amazing subs and 3 nights of junk. Does anyone else plan their whole week around lunar cycles or am I being too picky?

Unpopular opinion: Those $3,000 telescope shots just arent that impressive anymore

I used to think astrophotography was this magical art form that only geniuses could do. Then I watched a guy in Tucson process a 4 hour deep sky stack in about 15 minutes using free software. He barely touched the sliders and the nebula practically jumped out of the screen. Now every time I see a perfect Orion nebula shot on here I just wonder how much of it was the camera doing the work. Has anyone else started losing interest in these hyper processed images?

Not convinced that stacking 200+ images of the Veil Nebula is always better

I was reading a post where someone bragged about stacking 280 exposures of NGC 6992 and called it 'essential' for detail. Meanwhile I took a single 5 minute shot with my ZWO ASI294MC from my backyard in Phoenix and honestly saw just as much structure. I get that stacking reduces noise but at some point you're just adding processing time for tiny gains. Has anyone else tested a single long exposure against a massive stack and found diminishing returns?

Had to pick between a cheap zoom lens and a prime lens for my first nebula shot

I went with the prime because it was faster, and honestly the Andromeda core came out way sharper than I expected. Has anyone else noticed a big difference switching between lens types for deep sky photos?

A random Redditor told me my Jupiter photos were overprocessed and they were totally right

I spent like 6 months stacking and sharpening my Jupiter shots to the point where the bands looked like neon stripes, thinking more detail was better. Someone in a comment said I was crushing the data and losing all the natural texture, so I tried a lighter touch with just Registax and no extra sharpening. Now the planet actually looks like a real thing in space instead of a bad painting, has anyone else had to dial back their processing after getting called out?

The time a park ranger told me my telescope was pointed at the wrong star and he was right

Hot take: Someone told me to stop using auto-stacking in deep sky photos and I argued back, turns out they were right

A guy on a forum named Dave told me to bin my data manually instead of letting the software do it, so I tried it on my M51 shot from last October and the detail was way better, has anyone else been burned by auto-settings in their processing?

The Andromeda photo from my $200 scope looked better than the Hubble version

Bought a used 8-inch Dobsonian off Craigslist six months ago and finally got a clear night to stack 50 frames of M31. The detail in those dust lanes was sharper than any high-res NASA shot I'd seen online. Anyone else find their cheap setup outperforms expectations on specific targets?

Why I finally stopped skipping nebula photos at the astronomy club meetup

I used to scroll right past those colorful gas cloud images, thinking they were just pretty blobs anyone could make. But last month at the Phoenix Star Party, a guy named Dave showed me his 45-minute stacked exposure of the Orion Nebula on his laptop, explaining how each color layer reveals different elements like hydrogen and oxygen. Has anyone else had a specific photo or moment that completely changed what you look for in space images?

Question about that before and after in the Horsehead Nebula region from 2020 vs 2024

I saw a comparison of the same area around the Horsehead taken 4 years apart and the dust patterns looked totally different... is that just better processing or does that stuff actually move that fast? Anyone else notice big shifts in their own long term comparison shots?

Switched from stacking eyepieces to using a filter wheel last month

For years I was swapping out eyepieces one at a time for my lunar photos. It took me like 10 minutes between shots to get the right magnification and refocus. Last month I finally got a 5 position filter wheel with my main eyepieces loaded in. Now I can switch between views in about 2 seconds without touching the telescope. The difference in consistency for stacking images is huge. Anyone else made the switch and noticed less blur in their final stacks?

Went from rolling my eyes at star tracker photos to buying one after one night at Mt. Rainier

I always thought those star tracker rigs were just for people with too much money and time. Last summer I camped up at Reflection Lakes near Mt. Rainier and a guy let me look through his setup. He showed me a 4 minute exposure of the Milky Way that looked like a Hubble shot. Then I tried a 30 second shot on my tripod and it was just a blurry mess. The difference was so obvious I ordered a used Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer the next week. Has anyone else had that moment where you realized gear actually matters more than you thought?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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

Ngl, I was just layering them in Photoshop like frames in a flipbook, not aligning them properly. Last week I used Sequator on a shot of Orion and suddenly saw way more nebula detail. Has anyone else messed this up for way too long?

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

I was real skeptical when people kept saying Webb photos just look better because of processing. Then I spent an afternoon pulling raw data from both telescopes on the same target, the Pillars of Creation. Hubble's version is sharp but you can see where it hits its limit in infrared. Webb caught dust structures that are just invisible in Hubble's shots, no amount of editing would bring those out. Has anyone else sat down and really compared the raw files side by side?

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

I shot the Orion Nebula last week two ways. First I did a single 4 minute exposure at ISO 800. Then I stacked 20 two-minute exposures in DSS. The stacked image had way less noise and showed more of the nebula's outer gas clouds. But it took me an hour to process all those frames. Which approach do you folks normally use for bright nebula targets?