Can we talk about how I ruined 200 photos with bad calibration frames?

I spent 4 months stacking deep sky images wondering why everything looked noisy and washed out. Turns out I was taking my dark frames at the wrong temperature, 20 degrees off from my lights. A guy on Cloudy Nights pointed it out from one JPEG and I felt like an absolute fool.

2 comments

2 Comments

linda62629d ago

You wrote 'brutal one to catch'... I dunno, I mean it sucks for sure but is it really that serious? Like yeah you wasted 4 months and 200 shots but honestly most of us have done way dumber stuff in this hobby. I once spent 3 hours polar aligning only to realize my tripod was on a slight slope... and I still got usable images. Those 200 photos might not be perfect but I bet you could still salvage some with different processing. Plus you learned something right? That's worth more than a clean stack.

terryrobinson29d ago

Honestly, that's a brutal one to catch but at least you finally found the problem and it's such an easy fix going forward. I'd recommend writing the target temperature for your darks right on the camera or a sticky note so you never forget to match it with your lights again. Once you reshoot those darks at the right temp, you'll be amazed at how much cleaner your stacks look.