Finally got a clear shot of the Orion Nebula after 3 years of trying

I used to just point my old telescope at Orion and snap whatever came out, usually a blurry smudge. Then last month I finally bought a star tracker mount, and it changed everything. My first 30 second exposure with the tracker actually showed the dust lanes and the Trapezium cluster, something I'd only seen in other people's photos. What was the one piece of gear that made the biggest difference in your own astrophotography?

2 comments

2 Comments

johnson.jason2d agoRising Star

Honestly man, a solid star tracker mount. That alone saved my hobby.

johnson.jason2d agoRising Star

And that's the thing nobody talks about enough, how a star tracker is really just a cheat code for getting your exposure times to actually mean something. You can have the best camera and lens in the world but if you're fighting against the earth's rotation for more than 30 seconds you're just throwing away detail. I see people dropping thousands on a telephoto lens and then wonder why their milky way shots look like blurry garbage. It's not the glass that's the problem, it's that you're trying to paint a portrait of a moving target with a shaky hand. A decent tracker lets you stack exposures so you can actually pull out the faint stuff without turning your stars into little lines. Honestly it's like buying a race car and forgetting to put gas in it if you skip the tracker.