Checked the same nebula photo I took 2 years ago and saw a huge difference

I was digging through my old astrophotography files and compared a shot of the Orion Nebula from March 2022 with one from last week - the new one has way more detail in the core because I finally upgraded my guiding setup. Anyone else notice big improvements when they look back at their older images?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivan824d ago

... wait, hold on, you got more detail in the CORE of Orion just from upgrading your guiding? That is wild. I mean, I know tracking matters but I figured the core is usually blown out no matter what unless you're stacking like a hundred different exposure lengths or something. Dang, now I gotta look back at my old M42 shots and see if I can spot the difference. Your mileage may vary of course, but that sounds like a serious jump in quality.

ninag102d ago

Oh man @ivan82, you hit the nail on the head... its not really about the core being blown out, its about how sharp the faint stuff around it gets. When my guiding was bad, all that soft nebulosity just blended into the core and made it look flat. Once I got the stars tight, the core actually had visible structure, like those little dust lanes inside it that I never saw before. I had to re-process all my old shots too, and honestly some of them were hopeless because the tracking was that bad from the start. Its one of those things you don't realize until you upgrade and suddenly everything just clicks.