DAE think you absolutely need a tracking mount for deep sky photos?

I got a decent shot of the Orion Nebula from my backyard in Tucson just by stacking 200 one-second exposures (no tracker, just a tripod). Has anyone else tried this method with other targets?

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3 Comments

nguyen.morgan5mo ago

My buddy in Phoenix tried that with the Andromeda galaxy last fall... got a fuzzy gray smudge after stacking like 500 shots. He caved and bought a tracker the next week.

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sean8545mo ago

That one-second limit is for untracked shots, not just Orion.

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logan6585mo ago

That's a clever workaround for Orion (since it's so bright). The one-second limit is the real catch though. For most other nebulae and galaxies, you just can't gather enough light in such a short exposure, even with hundreds of frames. The signal gets lost in the camera's noise. A tracker lets you take much longer exposures, like 60 or 120 seconds each, to pull in those faint details. It's pretty much a must-have for targets beyond the very brightest ones.

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