My first stacked photo of Andromeda - 6 months of tiny improvements

I've been messing with astrophotography since last spring with just a DSLR and a tripod. For months my Andromeda shots looked like a blurry smudge with maybe a hint of the core. I tried stacking in DeepSkyStacker but kept getting garbage results because my frames were all misaligned. Then about 3 weeks ago I finally figured out how to polar align properly and took 45 thirty second exposures in one night. The difference after stacking those is night and day. I can actually see the dust lanes and the galaxy looks like a real thing instead of a fuzzy blob. It took me like 6 months of tiny fixes to get there. Anyone else spend way too long on a single target before getting something decent?

2 comments

2 Comments

kim.sandra16d ago

I remember spending like 4 months trying to shoot the Orion Nebula and every time I got a weird blue glow across the whole frame because I didn't realize my lens hood was slightly crooked lol.

wyatt_ross2716d ago

That line about "looked like a blurry smudge with maybe a hint of the core" hit me hard because that was exactly my Andromeda for like a year and a half. I feel your pain on the misalignment thing, that was my wall for months. What software did you end up using to stack after you got the polar alignment down? I'm still on DeepSkyStacker with some Siril tweaks and I've got a few decent stacks but my star shapes are still trash on the edges. Also how bad was your light pollution where you shot those 45 frames? I'm in a Bortle 6 zone and even with 30 second exposures my background gets washed out fast.