My shot of the Orion Nebula from 2022 looks like a gray blob now.

Took it with my old DSLR and a basic lens from my backyard in Phoenix. Just got a small telescope and a proper filter this January. The new photo shows pink gas and that faint blue haze around the stars. What's the one upgrade that made the biggest difference for your deep sky shots?

3 comments

3 Comments

jade8853mo ago

Oh man, Jason is totally right. I spent months just letting my camera do its auto thing before I actually sat down and learned manual mode. The biggest jump for me was finally getting how ISO, shutter speed, and aperture all work together. Once I stopped letting the camera guess and started telling it what to do for the night sky, my shots got way cleaner. That control lets you pull out way more detail before you even start stacking. It's like the difference between following a recipe and just throwing random stuff in a pot. What was the hardest setting for you to figure out?

dylanward2mo ago

My buddy Mark spent a whole trip to Joshua Tree fighting with his aperture. He kept it wide open at f/1.8 because he heard that was best for stars, but all his foreground rocks were just soft blobs. Took him a week to realize he needed to stop down to like f/4 or f/5.6 to get everything sharp.

the_jason3mo ago

Honestly, my biggest upgrade was just learning what all the buttons on my camera actually do.