Loading…
18
Just realized I've taken 1,400 moon shots over 3 years and only kept 12
Last night I finally backed up my hard drive and the folder for lunar pics had 1,412 files in it. I started in 2021 with a cheap 70-300mm lens on a crop body and just kept shooting every clear night from my backyard in Phoenix. For two years I thought more frames meant better results, so I would fire off 200 shot bursts and sort them later. Last week a guy in a local astronomy club looked at my setup and said, why are you stacking 200 when 20 good ones will beat them every time? I went back through my old sessions and he was right. My best shot, the one I printed at 16x20, came from a night where I only kept 8 frames out of 60 because the seeing was steady. So now I shoot less and wait more, even if it feels wrong to pack up after 15 minutes. Does anyone else have a keep rate that low, or am I just bad at culling?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
xena58222d ago
Kept around 10 out of 400 after my first Saturn season, so your rate sounds about right for a beginner grinding it out. The fix for me was learning to check the live view at 10x zoom before wasting shots, since good seeing shows up right away and bad seeing never gets better in post. Packing up early when the air is boiling is the smartest habit you can build, not a sign you're doing it wrong.
6
wade_kelly7722d ago
Curious how you judge the live view at 10x when the seeing is right on that edge between decent and garbage. Do you watch for the planet holding a sharp edge for a few seconds at a time, or is it more about how steady the moons look? I've had nights where the live view looked pretty good but the stacked result came out soft anyway, and other nights where it looked awful but a few frames turned out fine. What's the longest you'll sit there watching before deciding to just pack it in? Trying to figure out if I'm bailing too early on nights that could still give me something usable.
5