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Pro tip: a guy at the star party in Tucson said my focus was off by a hair and it changed how I shoot
Last month I drove out to a dark sky spot near Tucson with my old DSLR and a tripod, feeling pretty good about my setup. This older guy walks over while I'm framing Orion, glances at my screen, and says real quiet, 'your stars look like little footballs, not points.' I laughed it off at first but then I zoomed in and he was right, they were just slightly stretched. He showed me how he uses a simple Bahtinov mask he made out of cardboard, total cost like $3, and gets sharper stars than my autofocus ever managed. Back when I started shooting maybe 6 years ago, I was thrilled just to get anything that wasn't a blurry mess, and now I'm out here fussing over pixels I can barely see. We ended up standing in the cold for two hours just comparing shots and I learned more from him than from a whole weekend of YouTube videos. Anyway, does anyone here still use a mask or have you all moved on to some software trick I don't know about?
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