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Vent: My brother in law told me to skip the tracker and my nebula shots came out awful
I've been shooting the Orion Nebula from my backyard in Boise for about 7 months now. My brother in law does wedding photography and he said I didn't need a star tracker, just crank the ISO and take shorter subs. I listened to him and stacked 200 frames at 15 seconds each, and the noise was so bad I could barely pull any color out of it. Ordered a tracker the next day for $400 and my very first 3 minute shot had more detail than everything I got that whole night. So now I'm wondering, does anyone here actually shoot untracked and get results they're happy with, or was he just wrong about this?
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danielr9918h ago
Boise backyard for 7 months and your brother in law tells you to skip the tracker? That is wild to me. Wedding photography and deep sky imaging are like two totally different planets, the light is so much brighter on a wedding day that he probably never had to fight noise like we do. Crank the ISO and take short subs is the classic bad advice that sounds right until you actually try it on a nebula. 200 frames at 15 seconds should have been enough data if the setup was right, so the problem was almost certainly the read noise stacking up on every single sub. A tracker fixes that because longer subs bury the noise under the signal, which is exactly why your first 3 minute shot blew the whole night out of the water. He wasn't being mean, he just doesn't know our side of it.
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