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Stumbled on a 10 year old photo of the Orion Nebula vs. one I took last week
I was cleaning out an old external hard drive (the kind with the spinning disk, remember those?) and found a photo I took back in 2014 with a starter telescope. It was just a blob of pinkish gray. I barely knew how to stack frames back then. Fast forward to last week, I took another shot with a basic DSLR and a used tracker I got off Craigslist. Same target, same general area of sky. The difference is wild. The new one actually shows the dark dust lanes and the Trapezium stars clearly. All the little tutorials on YouTube about dithering and calibration frames really add up over time. Has anyone else gone back and re-shot an old target and been shocked at the progress?
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the_cora15d ago
You ever go back and look at your old stacked files and just cringe at what you thought was good back then? It's like the more you learn, the more you realize how much you were missing.
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Is it weird that I still keep my very first stacked image of M42 on my phone just to remind myself how far I've come? @the_cora you're totally right, looking back at those old stacks feels like watching a kid draw stick figures compared to what I can pull now. For me the biggest game changer was finally figuring out flat frames to fix all that vignetting I used to just accept as normal.
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