Hit 10,000 photos of the Milky Way last night without realizing it

I was sorting through my hard drive to clear space for a new camera, and I saw I had exactly 10,004 shots tagged with the Milky Way. That really surprised me because I never kept count or thought about it as a goal. It started seven years ago with a cheap tripod and a borrowed DSLR at a dark site outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Now I have a dedicated astro setup and I still miss the framing sometimes. Has anyone else passed a big number of photos of one target and felt weird about it?

3 comments

3 Comments

hugos461mo ago

The 10,004 number got me checking my own files, and apparently I've got 11,232 shots of the moon. Most of them are just blurry blobs (my cheap telephoto has really bad focus ring issues I keep ignoring). So hey, at least your Milky Way shots probably look like the Milky Way and not some weird glowing potato.

nancyg141mo ago

The whole "accident of time" thing really got me thinking... I used to feel like hitting big numbers meant you were doing something right, but you're totally changing my view here. I've got thousands of shots of the Pleiades that I never even look at because they're just the same thing over and over again with slightly different cloud cover. Maybe it's not about how many you take, it's about whether you actually learned something from them.

drew_jones311mo ago

That 10,000 number feels more like an accident of time than any real achievement. I've got about half that many of the Orion Nebula and it just reminds me how many frames I've tossed for tracking errors or bad focus.