Spent 4 hours trying to stack a single nebula photo before realizing my tracking was off

I was out near Lake Tahoe last weekend shooting the Orion Nebula with my DSLR. Got home, loaded everything into DeepSkyStacker, and kept getting these awful star trails no matter what settings I used. After 4 hours of tweaking and redoing stuff, I finally checked my polar alignment. Turns out my tripod had shifted slightly during setup and I was off by like 2 degrees. Has anyone else wasted a whole night on something this simple?

2 comments

2 Comments

robin77714d ago

Did you check if your tripod legs were on soft ground?

the_joseph14d ago

@robin777 got a point about soft ground, I've had that mess me up too. But honestly, sometimes the tiniest shift in polar alignment can make a whole session feel wasted. What saved me is always double checking my mount level before anything else and using a laser pointer to verify the polar scope. Takes 2 minutes but saves hours of headache later.