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My uncle said to skip the star tracker and just take 500 short shots, and he was right
My uncle has been into astrophotography since the 90s and he shoots from his backyard in Tucson. When I got my first DSLR last year I asked him if I should buy a star tracker, and he said no, just take hundreds of short exposures and stack them on my laptop. I figured he was just being cheap since trackers run $400 and up. So I spent 3 hours outside in my driveway fighting with my tripod, taking 500 shots of Orion at 2 seconds each, and I honestly thought I wasted my night. Then I stacked them in DeepSkyStacker and the result blew me away, way more detail in the nebula than my neighbor's single tracked shot of the same target. The magic is that stacking kills the noise and my cheap setup did the job for basically nothing. Now I'm wondering if I even need a tracker at all for wide field stuff. Has anyone here compared stacked short shots against a real tracker on the same target?
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emmam6720d ago
Watched a buddy do almost the same thing last winter with the Andromeda galaxy, 600 frames at 1.6 seconds on a plain tripod, and his stack came out really clean. He did have to throw away maybe 80 of them because a car drove by and washed out the frame, which is the one thing a tracker saves you from. On the flip side my other friend runs a tracker and gets the same result in like 20 minutes instead of 2 hours, so it's mostly about how much time you want to spend babysitting the shutter. For wide field stuff though, short stacks work great and your uncle gave you solid advice.
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