emma96•3mo ago

Stacking photos of Andromeda took me 4 HOURS to get right

I spent forever trying to figure out why my stacked images looked blurry. Turns out I was using the wrong alignment setting in DSS, wasted 4 hours that could have been spent actually capturing data. Did you guys figure out your stacking settings fast or did it take you ages too?

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mason_reed473mo ago

Wait, you're telling me there are people who actually got their stacking settings right on the first try? Man, I spent like three months thinking my polar alignment was off because my stars looked like little bananas, only to find out I had the wrong drizzle setting checked. Honestly I think half of astrophotography is just realizing you've been doing everything wrong and starting over. The other half is trying to not throw your laptop out a window when deepskystacker crashes for the fifth time. Your story about DSS alignment settings hits close to home though, I still have nightmares about the "star matching failed" error.

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blair_chen813mo ago

DSS crashing five times is amateur hour, mine once corrupted my entire library.

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alice9283mo ago

And the thing is you get so deep into these weird workarounds that you forget normal people don't speak in terms of "dark flats" and "drizzle patterns." I once spent a whole weekend debugging a stacking issue only to realize I'd left the lens cap on for half my exposures. At that point you just have to laugh and go make some coffee while DSS tries again.

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