That guy on CloudyNights told me my crescent nebula shot was too blurry, turns out he was dead wrong

I spent 3 hours stacking 120 subs of the crescent nebula back in February. Some guy named AstroMike75 commented saying my focus was off and I should toss half the frames. I ignored him because I thought I nailed the focus with my Bahtinov mask. Then I checked the individual frames and he was right about 40 of them having trailing from a gusty night. I reprocessed with just the good 80 frames and the detail in the nebula's shell popped way more. So yeah, sometimes the random advice on forums is actually worth listening to. Has anyone else had a stranger's critique save a whole processing session?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_wren3d ago

Wait wait wait, you had 40 frames out of 120 with actual trailing? That's almost a third of your data. I'd be pissed too but damn, glad you caught it before spending more time on junk frames.

avery_stone953d ago

Hold on though, @the_wren, is a third of your frames being junk really that bad? I mean, if those 40 frames were all in one spot or something obvious, you can just plan around them. I've had shoots where half my frames were unusable and I still pulled a decent timelapse out of it. Trailing just means something was moving, not that the whole dataset is trash. Plus, 120 frames is still a lot of data to work with even after cutting out the bad ones.