Just realized the Andromeda Galaxy photo I've been staring at for years is actually a composite of 400 something individual images

I was reading the description on a deep sky stack tutorial and it said the famous Hubble shot of Andromeda used over 400 separate exposures. I always thought it was just one really long exposure. Does anyone know how many hours of total exposure time that ended up being?

3 comments

3 Comments

young.ryan11d ago

Over 400 separate exposures" - yeah, that tracks with what a buddy of mine found out the hard way. He spent a whole weekend imaging Andromeda with his backyard setup, using a tracking mount and doing maybe 50 or 60 two-minute subs. He was all proud of it until he compared it to the Hubble shot and realized he was off by like a factor of ten. He said if you do the math on those 400 exposures, most of them were probably 20 to 30 minutes long each. That comes out to something like 150 to 200 hours of total exposure time. He just stared at his computer screen for a solid minute after he calculated that, then closed the laptop and went to bed.

garcia.jake11d ago

That "closed the laptop and went to bed" part got me, @young.ryan, because it's the same feeling I get when I try to cook something from a fancy recipe and realize the prep time alone is longer than my entire afternoon. It’s like the universe just quietly reminds us that some things take way more patience than we're ever ready to give them. But I guess that’s the deal with anything really worth doing, whether it’s astrophotography or just trying to perfect a grilled cheese.

abbyp6111d ago

Huh, and here I thought I was dedicated for taking 30 minutes to assemble a bookshelf from IKEA.