Stopped taking flat frames and my galaxy shots got sharper

Everyone pushes flat frames to fix dust spots and vignetting... I dropped that step from my routine last spring. For my refractor setup, the lens is so clean that the flats were just adding blur from slight misalignments. Now I spend that time on extra exposure, and the core details in my Andromeda photos are way better.

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3 Comments

hugo_ellis6mo ago

You know, a guy in my club had the exact same thing happen with his triplet apo. He was fighting soft stars for weeks and blamed his guiding. What finally clicked for him? He took a set of flats on a night with bad seeing, and that tiny bit of blur got baked into every single sub. He dumped the flats, re stacked just the lights, and the difference in the spiral arms of his M101 was nuts. Seems like if your optics are clean, a small error in the flat can do more harm than the vignetting it fixes. How much extra exposure time are you adding in now instead?

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angela8996mo ago

How do you deal with vignetting without flats?

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the_faith6mo ago

Heard about a buddy who messed up his dark frames instead. He was chasing weird noise patterns in his deep sky shots for ages. Turns out he took the darks at a different temperature than his lights. The stacker software tried to correct for noise that wasn't even there. He redid the darks at the right temp and the images cleared up instantly. It's wild how one small mistake in calibration can throw everything off.

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