Spent 3 hours trying to stack a single nebula photo before realizing my mistake

I was out until 2 AM last weekend shooting the Orion Nebula with my new tracker. Got home all excited, loaded the subs into DeepSkyStacker, and hit go. It sat there for an hour doing nothing but spinning. I checked my settings, watched a YouTube tutorial, tried different file formats. Three hours later I realized I had forgot to turn off the cameras long exposure noise reduction. Every frame had a 30 second gap between shots and the software couldnt align them. Has anyone else wasted a whole night because of a simple camera setting you overlooked?

2 comments

2 Comments

grant5696d ago

Three hours of your life and you're blaming that on noise reduction? Seems like half that time was just you troubleshooting the wrong thing. Next time check your settings before you even walk out the door, not after you've wasted a whole night.

logansullivan6d ago

...and that's exactly what I told my buddy Dave when he spent two hours tearing apart his furnace filter because his thermostat was reading wrong. Turned out his kid had knocked the sensor off the wall with a basketball. Same energy here, man. Sometimes you get so focused on the noise reduction thing you forget the basics. I've done it myself more times than I care to count, standing there scratching my head over something that was user error from the start.