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Shoutout to the cloudy night in Seattle that finally taught me to stop fighting my mount
Back in 2019 I was shooting from my apartment roof in Seattle, and I must have thrown out 40 hours of subs across three months because every star was a tiny streak. I kept blaming my polar alignment, so I'd spend an hour drift aligning, then still get trails, and I'd curse my cheap mount and the city glow. Then one night my neighbor (who shoots film, of all things) looked at my setup and asked why my tripod was sitting on a rubber mat on a wood deck. I had never once thought about vibration, and every time I touched the focuser or the shutter release, the whole rig was shaking just enough to smear things. I moved the tripod straight onto the concrete, hung my bag from the hook, and used a 2 second delay, and suddenly 4 minute subs at 200mm were round as could be. I felt so dumb, because the answer was never in the software or the alignment, it was the floor. Now I still cringe when I see people post rigs on balconies and ask why their stars are egg shaped. What's the dumbest physical thing you overlooked that turned out to be the whole problem?
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abby_cooper2d ago
Huh, I have to say I see it the other way, because a rubber mat on a wood deck will soak up a lot of shake compared to bare concrete, so the mat might not have been your problem at all. What probably got you was touching the focuser and the shutter while the rig was still settling, and the delay fixed that part no matter what the tripod sat on. Plenty of people shoot fine from decks and balconies, they just stop poking the mount while the shutter is open.
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