My brother told me to skip the star tracker for my first deep sky shot

He said I could just stack a lot of short exposures from my regular tripod. I tried it last month on the Orion Nebula with my Canon Rebel, taking two hundred 2-second shots. The final stack was just a noisy, streaky mess because the stars still moved. I had to go back out the next clear night with a rented tracker to get a clean image. Has anyone else been given well-meaning but totally wrong beginner advice?

3 comments

3 Comments

murray.robert7d agoMost Upvoted

Two hundred shots and it was still a streaky mess... that's just brutal. Your brother must have been thinking of a totally different kind of photo. Even at two seconds, the stars are gonna trail without a tracker, no way around it. That's a lot of work for a result that's basically unusable. Sounds like a rough lesson to learn the hard way.

angela_patel757d agoTop Commenter

Basically unusable" seems a bit harsh, doesn't it? It's just a photo. So the stars are a little streaky, so what? It's not like it was for a paid job or something. People get way too hung up on perfect gear and rules. Maybe the guy just liked being outside taking pictures. Who says every single shot has to be a masterpiece?

nina_hall487d ago

Yeah, getting those star shots is tricky. I had a similar thing happen before I got a tracker. What @murray.robert said is spot on about the trailing. I found stacking a bunch of shorter exposures in software later helped a ton.