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?

4 comments

4 Comments

grant_allen851mo agoMost Upvoted

Wait, you stacked 50 frames on a used 8-inch Dob? That's genuinely wild. Those dust lanes are the hardest thing to pull with cheap gear. Light pollution usually kills them dead. Did you use any kind of filter or just straight stacking? I've got a beat-up 10-inch that somehow pulls out the North America Nebula way better than my friend's fancy refractor. But Andromeda is a whole different beast. The core is so bright it washes everything else out. You must have some crazy dark skies too. Or you're a wizard at processing. Either way that's impressive as hell. Hubble's shots are usually overprocessed to show one thing. Real detail in the dust is way harder to fake.

the_joel1mo ago

You're comparing a processed stack to a single shot from space. Not really the same thing.

xena112d ago

Yeah, "real detail in the dust is way harder to fake" hits the nail on the head. I had the same thing happen with my 8-inch dob last winter on M81. Stacked 40 frames and the spiral arms came out way more defined than what I'd seen from Hubble's public releases. The trick for me was ditching any idea of a filter and just going hard on calibration frames - darks, flats, bias, all of them. And I only stack on nights where the moon is totally gone, that makes a bigger difference than any gear upgrade. Your Andromeda result sounds like you nailed the processing workflow too, which is half the battle with these cheap setups.

daniel_walker12d ago

grant allen hit on something there with the dark skies question. I mean you gotta have some serious Bortle class setup to pull that off with an 8-inch Dob. I live in a Bortle 5 zone and my M31 shots from last month looked like a fuzzy cotton ball no matter how many frames I stacked. What kind of light pollution are you working with? Also, did you try any gradient removal tools during processing or just rely on the calibration frames to fix the background? I found that gradient removal took my M81 from looking like a smudge to actually seeing spiral structure, but it also added a ton of artifacts around the edges.