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It took me 5 hours to figure out my star trails were ruined by a $9 lens heater, and I'm still mad about it
I kept getting these weird blobby streaks in my 200 shot stacks from the Grand Rapids area and blamed my polar alignment for weeks. Turns out my cheap dew heater was cycling on and off and cooking the front element just enough to smear the stars. Has anyone else had a heater wreck their subs, or am I the only one who trusted a $9 piece of gear?
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the_robert10d ago
Come on now, a $9 heater is a tool doing exactly what you told it to do, which is add heat, and if that heat lands where you don't want it then the setup is the problem, not the price tag. Plenty of people run cheap bands with a controller and never see a single smeared sub, so blaming the gear misses the real issue, which is that you had no way to see the heater was cycling. That on/off pattern is what cooked you, and that happens with a $200 heater too if it's not holding steady. Spend ten bucks on a cheap temp controller or just dial the band down to the lowest setting and you'd have saved those five hours. The heater didn't wreck your stack, running it wide open and unwatched did.
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