c/astronomy-photos

Never cared about light pollution until I saw a photo from a dark sky reserve

I used to think light pollution was just a minor annoyance. Then I looked up a comparison of the Milky Way shot from my backyard in Dallas versus one taken at Big Bend National Park, and the difference was stunning. Have any of you noticed a big change when you got away from city lights?

I think stacking filters is overrated for lunar shots

Everyone says you need an IR cut and a polarizer for the moon, but I got my sharpest crater detail last week with just a Baader ND 3.8 and no stacking at all. Has anyone else tried stripping it down to one filter and gotten better results?

I finally saw the Milky Way clearly at a dark sky park in Pennsylvania

Last weekend I drove out to Cherry Springs State Park, which is known for having some of the darkest skies on the East Coast. It took about 3 hours from where I live, and I was worried the weather would mess things up. But around midnight the clouds cleared and I could see the Milky Way stretching across the sky with my naked eyes. I have looked at photos of it for years, but seeing it in person made me realize how much detail gets lost in even the best camera shots. Has anyone else been to a dark sky site and noticed the same thing?

Took my telescope out last Tuesday and a deer nearly knocked it over

I had my 8-inch Dobsonian set up in the backyard around 11pm, trying to get a clear shot of Saturn. Out of nowhere a deer came crashing through the fence and ran right past me, bumping the tripod leg just hard enough to send the whole thing swaying. Has anyone else had wildlife interrupt their viewing session like that?

Appreciation post: That one stat about how many stars are in a typical galaxy

I saw on a space forum that the average galaxy has around 100 billion stars. Made me feel tiny in a good way. Anyone else get that from looking at photos?

Took me 5 years to figure out I was stacking my astro photos all wrong

I used to just layer them on top of each other in Photoshop and wonder why I kept getting blurry stars. Then a guy on a forum mentioned using median stacking in DeepSkyStacker and showed me his result from the same Orion Nebula data I had sitting on my drive from 2019. Total game changer, has anyone else had a similar "oh duh" moment with their processing?

That one week in March where Jupiter and Saturn lined up perfectly every night

I got clear skies for 6 straight nights and captured the best shot of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction I've ever taken, and I still can't believe my luck because the next week it was clouds every damn day.

Just found out the moon is moving away from Earth by 1.5 inches a year lol

I was reading Wikipedia at 2am in a random rabbit hole and apparently that means in like 600 million years we won't get total solar eclipses anymore. Why does nobody warn you about this stuff when you're scrolling astro pics?

My coworker Lenny swore by a $30 Orion eyepiece over my $200 Tele Vue

So last month I'm out at a dark site near Moab with a few guys from the local club. Lenny's been shooting astro photos for like 15 years, I've only been at it for maybe 2. He keeps going on about how his cheap 6mm Orion Expanse gives him sharper moon shots than my expensive gear. I laughed it off until we both aimed at the same crater and compared results on our laptops. His image had way less chromatic aberration around the edges. Now I'm wondering if I wasted money on premium glass or if that was just a fluke with that one target. Has anyone else had a cheap eyepiece outshine a high end one?

I used to think stacked astro photos were cheating, now I do it every time

For the first 3 years of shooting night sky stuff, I refused to stack anything. I thought it was fake, like you weren't a real photographer if you didn't nail it in one shot. Then I spent a weekend at Cherry Springs back in 2021 and this older guy set up next to me. He showed me his single frame of the Milky Way versus his stacked version and I couldn't argue with it. The stacked one had detail in the dust lanes that just wasn't there in the single. I still try to get a good single exposure first, but now I always grab at least 20 frames and stack them in DeepSkyStacker. Has anyone else gone from hating stacking to loving it?

Spent 45 minutes trying to stack a 30 second astro photo... forgot to turn off the tracking mount

Last Friday I was out in the backyard with my DSLR trying to shoot Orion, and I had this plan to stack about 20 frames to get a cleaner shot. I set everything up, did 30 second exposures at ISO 1600, thought I was golden. Got back inside, loaded them into DeepSkyStacker, and the alignment kept failing hard. I kept adjusting settings, re-downloading updates, even restarted my laptop twice. After almost an hour of frustration I realized my tracking mount was still moving between exposures so the stars shifted too much to align. Now I know to park the mount before stacking. Has anyone else burned a whole night because of something dumb like that?

The Andromeda Galaxy photo I took last week had a satellite streak through it

I was going through my stack of 30 second exposures from Tuesday night and one frame had a perfect straight line right across Andromeda's core. A quick check on heavens-above.com confirmed it was a Starlink satellite passing at exactly 11:47pm. I'd read that satellite trails were getting more common in astrophotography but seeing it wreck a clean shot surprised me more than I expected. Has anyone else had a satellite photobomb a deep sky target they were working on?

That time I nearly ruined my telescope camera sensor

I was out at Joshua Tree last month trying to get a shot of the Andromeda galaxy and forgot to swap my focal reducer off. The dew started rolling in and I didn't catch it until my exposure started looking like a blurry mess. Has anyone else had gear fail on them mid-session because of a simple oversight?

Smartphone astro mode vs my old DSLR stack

I took 120 phone exposures on a tripod last weekend. My Canon 60D with 3 stacked 30-second frames looked way cleaner. Less noise, more color. Am I missing something with phone processing tricks?

Stood in the desert for an hour trying to get a star shot right

I was out at the Great Sand Dunes last month, had my tripod set up for some Milky Way photos. The sky was clear but I kept cranking the ISO too high and getting noise in the shots. After about 45 minutes of fiddling with settings, I finally dropped it to 3200 ISO at f/2.8 and did a 20 second exposure. Came out way cleaner than anything I got before. That whole trip I was just chasing better darkness and got more detail than I expected. Has anyone else had a moment where a simple change in settings saved a whole night of shooting?

PSA: Stop calling every bright speck in a photo a 'planet'

I was scrolling through the Andromeda thread last night and saw someone call a foreground star 'Jupiter' because it was bright. It's not Jupiter, it's a star that's like 500 light years away. How do I know? I used free software called Stellarium to match the field of view from OP's shot. You can do it too in about 10 minutes. Why does it matter? Because if you're trying to learn the sky, getting basic labels wrong just confuses everyone else. Has anyone else noticed people mixing up satellites and stars in widefield shots?

Just realized stacking my astronomy photos in DeepSkyStacker works way better than Sequator for faint nebulae

I've been shooting the same Andromeda target for about 3 months now, trying different stacking software to see what gives the cleanest results. Sequator was my go-to because it's fast and handles star trails, but I kept getting weird background noise on dimmer regions. Switched to DeepSkyStacker on a whim last week for the same 40 frames I already had, and the difference was night and day. Much better signal-to-noise on the faint outer arms. Anyone else find one staker works way better for certain targets? What's your go-to and why?

Debate: Should we stop airbrushing out satellites in widefield photos?

I keep seeing these gorgeous Milky Way shots where people clone out every satellite trail, and it bugs me. I mean, I get wanting a clean image, but removing modern sky traffic feels like lying about what's really up there. Last week I spent 3 hours stacking a shot from my backyard and left all 17 satellite streaks in because they're part of our sky now. Doesn't that tell a truer story than some fake pristine view from 1950? What do you all think when you see 'cleaned up' astro photos?

Spent a night at the Cherry Springs dark sky park and honestly, the light pollution rules felt a bit over the top.

A guy at the star party told me my Andromeda shots were too blue

He said I was pushing the blue channel too hard in post, making it look fake. I dialed it back about 30% and now the core looks more natural, less like a cartoon. Anyone else get called out for over-processing a specific color?

My sister said my astro shots looked 'too perfect' to be real

She saw my stacked image of the Orion Nebula from last weekend and thought it was a NASA picture. Makes you wonder about sharing the raw process more, you know?

A debate on stacking vs. single exposures after a night at Joshua Tree

I was out at Joshua Tree last month trying to get the Milky Way. My first few single 30-second shots looked okay, but the noise was bad. Then I tried stacking 50 images, and the detail was crazy clear. But it took over an hour of computer time and felt less 'real'. Which is better, the clean stacked image or the quicker single shot that captures the moment? What's your take?

That time my camera battery died right as the Milky Way came into view

I was out at Joshua Tree last fall, about an hour from the main park entrance, all set up with my tripod and my Canon 6D. The sky was perfectly clear, and I was just waiting for the galactic core to rise. I hit the shutter for a test shot and my camera screen just went black. I forgot to charge my spare battery, and the one in the camera had maybe two percent left. My heart just sank. I ended up sitting there in the dark for a good twenty minutes, just watching the stars with my own eyes, feeling pretty stupid. I did get my phone out and took some really grainy, awful pictures, but it wasn't the same. Has anyone else had a gear failure at the worst possible moment, and what did you do to salvage the night?

Appreciation post: My star tracker setup took three nights, not the one hour I thought

I tried to get a good shot of the Orion Nebula from my backyard in Flagstaff last week. The problem was my star tracker's polar alignment... I just could not get it right with the phone app. I spent over six hours across three nights trying to get it perfect, only to have star trails in every single test shot. Finally, I dug out the old manual polar scope that came with it and got it dialed in on the fourth night. Has anyone else had this much trouble with those alignment apps?

My uncle said I needed a star tracker for the Milky Way, and he was right

I was trying to get a good shot of the Milky Way core from a dark site in Joshua Tree last year with just my camera on a tripod. My uncle, who's been into astrophotography for a decade, told me my 20-second exposures would always have star trails without a tracker. I didn't listen at first, but after three failed attempts with blurry stars, I borrowed his Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer. The next clear night, I used it for 90-second exposures at ISO 1600. The difference was huge, with sharp stars and way more detail in the dust lanes. Has anyone else had a piece of gear advice that completely changed their results?