Spent 2 hours trying to stack my first deep sky image and it came out looking like a smudge

I finally got my act together to try astrophotography last month and set up my DSLR on a star tracker in my backyard. Got like 40 frames of the Andromeda Galaxy, felt pretty proud. Then I sat down to stack them in DeepSkyStacker and realized I had no clue what any of the settings meant. I must have clicked through 5 different tutorials and still ended up with a green blob that looked nothing like those photos you see online. Took me a full 2 hours just to get something that vaguely resembled a galaxy, and even then it was super noisy. I finally figured out I needed to take calibration frames (darks and flats) which I completely skipped. Has anyone else spent way too long on their first stack only to get a garbage result?

3 comments

3 Comments

john_fisher1mo agoMost Upvoted

Quit complaining, two hours is nothing for learning a skill.

mianelson1mo ago

Is two hours really "nothing" though, or is it just not enough to get good? I mean, you can learn the absolute basics of a skill in two hours (like how to tune a guitar or write a simple "hello world" program), but that's a far cry from actually being able to do anything useful with it. The real issue is people not knowing what "learning a skill" actually looks like, you know, they think watching a 30-minute YouTube video means they've got it down.

christopherw341mo ago

Oh come on. Two hours for a real skill is barely scratching the surface. You can't learn guitar or coding or welding in a Saturday afternoon. People want instant results but that's not how anything hard works. Either put in the real time or find a new hobby.