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Three hours to stack one image and I still messed it up
I spent a whole evening trying to stack 45 shots of the Andromeda galaxy in DeepSkyStacker and the program kept crashing on me. Turns out I had a corrupted file mixed in from a night where the battery died mid exposure. After hunting through the logs and re downloading the software twice, I finally got it to work at 2 in the morning. Then I realized I forgot to take flat frames so the whole thing had a nasty gradient across the bottom. Anyone else waste a night on something that should have taken 20 minutes?
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wright.leo16d ago
@jake747 did you ever figure out if the dust donuts were visible on the individual subs before stacking, or did they only show up after all that alignment and integration work?
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jake74716d ago
The corrupted file thing is brutal. I spent three nights imaging M31 one time and when I went to stack, DSS just kept locking up around 60%. Turns out one of my light frames had a weird artifact from a passing satellite that must've messed with the sensor readout. I had to go through all 200 frames one by one in a thumbnail viewer to find the culprit. And then after all that, I zoomed in on the final stacked image and saw these weird dust donuts I'd never noticed before because I hadn't cleaned my sensor in like six months. Had to basically throw away a whole week of data and start over once I finally got the sensor properly cleaned.
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jennifer_jones1716d ago
Oh man, that is such a classic astrophoto move, I feel your pain. My buddy Mike, he spent like four hours one night stacking a big set of Orion nebula shots, and he was so proud of himself. Then he zoomed in and realized he'd accidentally left his camera on "small JPEG" instead of RAW from a hiking trip the week before. He had to redo the whole thing from scratch with the raw files he saved, but the small JPEGs had already messed up his calibration frame workflow. He said he just stared at the screen for a solid ten minutes before he could even start over. It's always something stupid like that, right?
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