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A guy at the Joshua Tree star party said my stacked Milky Way shots looked 'flat and dead' so I tried tracking instead
I've been doing untracked wide field shots for about 3 years now, mostly from a spot off Pinto Basin Road near Joshua Tree where the sky is dark enough to actually see the dust lanes. Last month this older guy with a beat up Sky-Watcher mount asked to see my camera screen after I'd been shooting for an hour, and he just goes 'those look flat and dead, you're losing all your faint hydrogen.' I got kind of defensive at first because I liked my shots, but he pulled up one of his on his phone and the difference hit me right in the face. The core had actual color and structure instead of just being a bright blob, and you could see the dark lanes going way further out. So the next weekend I borrowed a friend's iOptron tracker and redid the same shot with 90 second subs instead of my usual 15, and stacking 40 of those gave me detail I'd been throwing away for 3 years. I still shoot some untracked stuff when I'm hiking light, but for anything I actually want to keep I'm dragging the tracker out now. Anyone else get humbled by a stranger at a star party like that? What finally made you switch to a mount?
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piper_green1mo ago
That older guy sounds like he did you a huge favor even if it stung in the moment, because losing faint hydrogen is exactly the thing you can't get back once the subs are stacked. Getting humbled like that at a star party is honestly pretty normal, and it beats spending another three years wondering why your core looks like a blob. Good on you for actually trying the tracker instead of just getting mad about it.
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