My dumb mistake with star stacking took me 4 hours to fix

I spent a whole night capturing the Orion nebula a couple weeks ago. Got about 200 frames with my tracker all set up right. Came inside feeling good, loaded them into the stacking software. And nothing looked right, the stars were all trails and the nebula was a blur. Turns out I had the tracking speed set to lunar instead of sidereal the whole time. Took me hours of troubleshooting forums at 2 AM to figure out that one tiny setting. I was so mad at myself for not double checking it before I started. Has anyone else lost a night of data to a simple forgotten setting?

3 comments

3 Comments

faithg261mo ago

Wait, lunar tracking for astrophotography is even a thing?

luna_green1mo ago

Commiseration here... done that with the wrong dithering setting before.

dylan4131mo ago

Lunar tracking is an actual mode mostly for moon shots, super niche. You'd have to catch that little menu option though, easy miss. Bet those 200 frames made a cool timelapse of star trails at least.