Spent 4 hours trying to stack a single photo of Andromeda

I couldn't figure out why my stacked image kept coming out blurry last Tuesday. Turns out I was using the wrong alignment mode in DeepSkyStacker, picked 'planetary' instead of 'star alignment'. Has anyone else lost a whole evening to a setting they overlooked?

3 comments

3 Comments

sethc121mo agoMost Upvoted

Rookie move, but hey, at least you didn't spend four hours imaging clouds like I did last month.

the_anna1mo ago

Wait, nobody's pointed out that clouds can actually be useful calibration targets if you know what you're doing. Four hours of cloud imaging sounds painful but at least you probably got some interesting atmospheric data out of it. How many people can say they have a dedicated cloud library on their hard drive?

hall.ruby1mo ago

Clouds are actually great for flat field calibration in my experience.

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