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My uncle looked at my Orion Nebula shot and asked why it was so blurry, and he was right
I showed my uncle a stack of 40 subs I took of the Orion Nebula from my driveway in Tucson, and he just squinted and said it looked like a smudge on a windshield. I got defensive at first, but he pulled up a single 30 second shot from his old DSLR and it had more detail than my whole stack. Turns out I was shooting at ISO 6400 and my focus was off by just a hair, which I never caught because I was only checking the back screen. Spent two hours redoing my focus with a Bahtinov mask and the difference in the next stack was night and day. Anyone else have a family member who doesn't know astronomy call out something obvious you missed?
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samflores6d ago
Did your uncle ever ask to look through the scope after that? A buddy of mine had almost the same thing happen with his dad, who is a retired mechanic and knows nothing about space. His dad glanced at a blown up photo of the Pleiades on the laptop and said the stars looked like little comets, and sure enough my buddy had slight tracking drift the whole night. He was so sure his mount was dialed in that he never zoomed past 50 percent on the screen to check. The part that got me is his dad spotted it in about five seconds while my buddy had been staring at it for a week. Sometimes fresh eyes just catch what our brains skip over because we want the shot to be good.
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