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My brother said I needed a star tracker for deep sky shots and I thought he was just showing off | Astronomy Photos - Talk Freely

noahcampbell•6mo ago

My brother said I needed a star tracker for deep sky shots and I thought he was just showing off

For the longest time, I was convinced I could get good shots of galaxies and nebulae just by stacking a bunch of short exposures from my basic tripod. My brother, who's been into this for a decade, kept telling me, 'Noah, you're wasting your time. You need a tracker to follow the stars, even a cheap one.' I finally borrowed his Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer for a weekend at a dark site near Flagstaff. The difference was insane. My old method gave me fuzzy, streaky blobs after 200 shots. With the tracker doing a 3-minute guided exposure, the Orion Nebula just popped with detail I'd never seen in my own photos. He was totally right. It's not about having fancy gear, it's about letting the camera actually collect the light. Anyone have tips for polar alignment without a clear view of Polaris?

3 comments

3 Comments

valw366mo ago

Totally agree, your brother knows his stuff. I tried the stacking-only route for months and never got close to the detail a basic tracker gives you in one good exposure. How do you handle wind with your setup?

rileyellis6mo ago

Oh man, wind is the worst. My buddy learned that the hard way last fall. He had his tracker set up for a great shot of Andromeda, and a gust came through that basically turned his whole rig into a sail. The image was a total blur. That's the kind of thing that makes me side-eye takes like @elizabeth900's. Sure, you can stack a ton of short shots, but if the wind is shaking the tripod even a little, every single one of those frames is soft. A good tracker with a solid tripod and maybe some weight on the hook handles real conditions way better than hoping for dead calm all night.

elizabeth9006mo ago

Your brother gave you bad advice that wastes money. Trackers are a crutch for people who can't master the stacking software. I get cleaner results from 500 one-second shots on a solid tripod than you did with that three-minute guided mess. All that extra gear just adds points of failure and weight to your pack. The real skill is in processing, not in buying another gadget to do the work for you.