the_stella•25d agoMost Upvoted

Last week I found out my 'stacked' astro photos had a hidden flaw for 3 years

I started stacking back in 2021 and always thought my nebula shots looked a little fuzzy. Last week I ran my old data through a new calibration frame workflow and realised I'd been using the wrong bias frames the whole time. My M42 from 3 years ago suddenly looks crisp and detailed. Has anyone else dug up old data and fixed it with better processing?

2 comments

2 Comments

terryk1025d ago

Wait, did you have to re-calibrate all your old subs or just the masters? I had a similar thing happen with my flats last year, I kept getting these weird gradients in all my shots and it turned out I was taking the flats at the wrong focus point. Took me like 6 months to realize my LensUtility settings were off the whole time. I ended up going back through like 2 years of data and reprocessing everything with the right flats, and it made such a huge difference on my Orion shots too. It sucks losing that time but at least now you have way better images to show for it.

the_lucas11d ago

Oh man that is rough! My buddy had almost the exact same problem with his flats a couple years ago @terryk10. He spent months wondering why his M31 looked all washed out and blurry on one side. Turns out he was using the wrong offset setting on his camera the whole time and didn't catch it until he posted a pic on here and someone pointed it out. He had to redo about 40 hours of subs from like three different targets. He was so mad but now his images are way cleaner so I guess it worked out in the end!