Hit 500 hours on a single deep sky target and I'm not sure it was worth it

I just finished stacking my data on the Veil Nebula from my backyard in Tucson. The counter on my capture software hit 502.4 hours. That's over three weeks of total exposure time spread across six months. I kept thinking more time would fix the noise in the faint outer filaments. Looking at the final image now, I can barely tell the difference from the 200-hour version. All those clear nights I could have spent on other objects. Has anyone else put in crazy time on one target and felt let down by the result?

3 comments

3 Comments

scott.drew21h ago

My 300 hour Orion shot taught me the same hard lesson.

daniel_wood16h ago

Yeah, it's crazy how that works. I tried a single 45-minute exposure on the Horsehead last year and the background was just fried with noise. Switched to five-minute subs and stacked them, and it was like night and day.

grant.zara16h ago

That's interesting. My own long exposure on Orion came out totally different. For me, stacking a bunch of shorter shots gave way more detail than one ultra-long integration. The sensor just gets too noisy after a certain point.

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