c/astronomy-photos

Stuck between a refractor and a Dobsonian for my first real scope

Been using a little 60mm department store scope for a year and finally saved up $600 to upgrade. Narrowed it down to a 4 inch ED doublet refractor or an 8 inch Dobsonian, real tough call. I went with the Dobsonian because aperture wins and I wanted to see deep sky stuff bad... got it set up last week and M13 looked incredible, way better than I hoped. Now I'm wondering if I should have gone with the refractor for sharper planetary views, anyone else wrestle with this choice?

Took me 45 minutes to figure out my telescope mount was upside down

I was setting up my gear last week for the Orion Nebula and spent way too long wondering why my polar alignment was off. After about 30 minutes of tweaking knobs and getting frustrated, I realized I had mounted the whole dovetail plate on the wrong side. Another 15 minutes to redo it all and finally get pointing correctly. Has anyone else had a simple setup mistake eat up half your observing time before?

Bought a $200 solar filter for my telescope

Saw a deal online and grabbed it without checking reviews. First use left weird spots on all my sun photos. Anyone else get burned by cheap astro gear?

Are we too quick to edit out the flaws in our astro photos?

I was at a local astronomy club meetup last month in Tucson and this older guy named Dave pointed at my Andromeda photo on my laptop. He said 'that's nice but the stars look fake.' He was right, I had used a lot of heavy processing to smooth out the noise and sharpen everything. I told him I was just trying to make it look clean and professional. But he argued that the imperfections like slight trailing or uneven color are what make an image feel real and honest. It stuck with me because I see so many processed photos online that look perfect but almost artificial. So I'm wondering, do you guys prefer a raw photo with its flaws or a heavily edited one that looks polished? Where do you draw the line between making it look good and losing the reality of what we actually captured through the telescope?

Spent $300 on a star tracker mount and got nothing but blurry photos for 3 months

I bought a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer last summer thinking it would fix my Milky Way shots. Instead I spent three months fighting with polar alignment and still got trails every time. One side says you need to invest in a proper wedge and guiding setup for it to work. The other side says it's fine for beginners if you just practice more and watch tutorials. Has anyone else wasted money on a tracker they couldn't figure out, or am I the only one who regrets it?

My telescope mount died on the best viewing night of the year

I finally got a clear night last Thursday after weeks of clouds, and my mount just quit on me halfway through alignment. The DEC motor started making this grinding noise and then stopped responding at all. I spent the rest of the night just looking up with binoculars instead, which was actually pretty nice but not what I planned. Has anyone had luck fixing a clutch issue on an EQ mount yourself, or is it better to just send it off for repair?

Spent 2 hours trying to stack a single astrophoto and it was user error the whole time

I finally got a clear shot of the Orion Nebula last Saturday night. It took me 45 minutes to get 30 good frames. Then I spent 2 whole hours trying to stack them in DSS and the result looked like a blurry mess. Turns out I had the wrong calibration frames selected the entire time. I clicked the darks box instead of flats and DSS just gave up. Has anyone else wasted a whole night on a silly software setting?

Compared a $30 eyepiece to a $200 one on the same nebula photo setup and wow the difference was huge

I've been shooting M42 the Orion nebula for like 2 years with this cheap Plossl eyepiece I got off Amazon. Decided last weekend to borrow my friend's Tele Vue Delos 10mm he swore by. Same telescope, same camera, same night. The cheap one had all this purple fringing around the stars and the nebula looked kinda washed out. The expensive one? Crisp stars, way more detail in the dust lanes. I couldn't believe what I was missing. Has anyone else done a side by side like that and been shocked at what a better eyepiece does?

Best week of Jupiter shots I've ever had - or just bad processing?

Last Tuesday I got 4 clear nights in a row with my 8 inch dob and a used ZWO ASI224MC, and the raw frames looked amazing with the Great Red Spot really popping. But after stacking in Autostakkert and tweaking in Registax, the final images look almost fake - too sharp and saturated like a CGI render. Anyone else get results that feel too good to be true and wonder if they're messing up the processing or finally getting it right?

Before and after of Jupiter's Great Red Spot shrinking over 10 years, natural or something else?

I saw a side by side photo comparison from 2014 and 2024 of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. The spot is visibly smaller in the recent photo, like a third less wide. Some people say it's just a natural cycle Jupiter goes through every few decades. Others think it might be linked to changes in the planet's internal heat or weather patterns we don't fully understand yet. Which side do you lean on, natural cycle or something more unusual going on deep in the atmosphere?

My telescope mount failed during the Perseids last month

I had everything set up for the peak of the Perseid meteor shower on August 12th. My mount just stopped tracking after about 20 minutes, no warning or error. Turns out the internal cable to the RA motor broke clean off inside the housing. I spent the rest of the night just watching with my eyes instead, which was actually pretty nice but I missed getting any photos. Has anyone else had a mount fail on a big night like that?

That one comment about andromeda at a stargazing event changed how i see photos

Last month at a local park meetup, some kid pointed at my screen and said 'that galaxy is from 2.5 million years ago, not today.' I never really thought about time delay in astrophotography before. How do you process the idea that what you're capturing is ancient history?

Was totally wrong about using my phone for night sky photos

I spent like two years thinking you needed a $2000 camera to get any decent shot of stars or the moon. Kept seeing these incredible astro photos online and figured I just couldn't do it with my iPhone. Then last week I downloaded a free app called NightCap and tried a 30 second exposure on a tripod I borrowed from a buddy. Got a picture of the Orion Nebula that actually showed its fuzzy cloud shape, not just a dot. I was honestly shocked it worked that well. Has anyone else had a cheap setup totally change what you thought was possible?

Last month I tried shooting the Milky Way from my backyard in Phoenix and got nothing but orange glow

I live in downtown Phoenix where the light pollution is brutal, and I spent an hour trying to get a decent shot of the Milky Way with my Canon Rebel T7. All I got was this washed out orange mess in every frame. Does anyone have a cheap filter or editing trick that works for urban astrophotography?

Question about that $60 star tracker I impulse bought off Craigslist

So I snagged a used Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer for $60 from some guy in Portland last weekend. It was missing the counterweight but I figured I could rig something up with a water bottle. Has anyone else tried using a DIY weight on these things or should I just bite the bullet and order the official one for $40?

Just realized the Andromeda Galaxy photo I've been staring at for years is actually a composite of 400 something individual images

I was reading the description on a deep sky stack tutorial and it said the famous Hubble shot of Andromeda used over 400 separate exposures. I always thought it was just one really long exposure. Does anyone know how many hours of total exposure time that ended up being?

Tried astrophotography with an old DSLR and got better shots than my fancy telescope

I bought a used Canon 60D off Craigslist for $200 and figured I'd try taking pics of the Orion Nebula with just a standard 75-300mm lens on a tripod. No tracking mount or anything fancy. I stacked about 50 short exposures in DeepSkyStacker and couldn't believe what came out - you could actually see the nebula's shape and color. My $800 telescope with a smartphone adapter gave me worse results every time. Learned that aperture and sensor quality beat magnification for deep space stuff. Has anyone else had luck with just a camera and lens for nebula shots?

Appreciation post: That guy who told me to try stacking my lunar shots in RegiStax instead of DSS

Been fighting with blurry moon photos for about 8 months now. I tried every tutorial on DeepSkyStacker I could find but my stacks always came out soft. Finally a random commenter on a forum said to give RegiStax a shot for lunar work since it handles surface detail better. First try with 200 frames from my last session and the craters popped like I never saw before. Has anyone else found a specific stacking tool that just clicks for one type of object over another?

Am I the only one who thinks false color images are overdone?

I keep seeing everyone post these super saturated nebula photos with wild colors that aren't real. I mean, the Hubble palette is cool and all, but it bugs me when people don't label it clearly. A friend at my local astronomy club in Tucson showed me how to pull raw data from NASA archives, and the actual hydrogen alpha is just a faint red glow. Why not post the true color version alongside the processed one so newcomers know what they're looking at? Has anyone else tried explaining this to a beginner and had them not believe you?

Shoutout to the guy who corrected my Andromeda photo last month. He was right.

I was at a dark sky site in Maine. Thought my Andromeda shot was perfect. Someone pointed out the core was overexposed. I spent weeks tweaking my stacking method. Now the detail in the dust lanes is insane. Has anyone else had a random stranger fix their work?

A guy in an online critique group told me my Milky Way shots were boring and he was right

I used to just point my camera at the galactic core and call it a day. He said I needed foreground elements that tell a story, like an old barn or a silhouetted tree. So I drove out to a friend's farm in Iowa and framed a rusty windmill against the night sky. Now my photos actually have depth instead of just looking like a science textbook.

Heard a NASA engineer say phone cameras are ruining our night sky pics

Overheard a guy at the coffee shop who works at JPL talking about how modern phone processing adds fake stars and dims real ones in astrophotography. He said 90% of the "nebula" shots on Instagram are actually phone noise being hallucinated. Made me rethink posting that Orion photo I took last week.

Spent $350 on a star tracker mount and it just sits in my closet now

I got really into astrophotography last spring after seeing some Milky Way shots online. Bought this iOptron SkyGuider Pro for like $350 off CloudyNights. Thought I'd be taking epic wide field shots every weekend. First night out I spent 45 minutes trying to polar align and gave up. Second time I got it set up but my camera battery died after 20 minutes. Third time the wind knocked the whole thing over while I was inside grabbing a coffee. Now it's been 6 months and that mount hasn't left my closet. My backyard in Phoenix has too much light pollution anyway. Anyone else buy gear that sounded amazing but you just couldn't make work? What did you do with yours?

Three hours to stack one image and I still messed it up

I spent a whole evening trying to stack 45 shots of the Andromeda galaxy in DeepSkyStacker and the program kept crashing on me. Turns out I had a corrupted file mixed in from a night where the battery died mid exposure. After hunting through the logs and re downloading the software twice, I finally got it to work at 2 in the morning. Then I realized I forgot to take flat frames so the whole thing had a nasty gradient across the bottom. Anyone else waste a night on something that should have taken 20 minutes?

Tried to capture a comet last week and got a blurry streetlamp instead