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Update: should have skipped the star tracker and just stacked short shots on my trip to Sedona
Went out to Sedona last month with my Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer and got maybe 4 usable frames all night because polar alignment kept drifting on the soft ground. Few nights later I just plopped my camera on a plain tripod, shot 200 frames at 8 seconds each, and stacked them in DeepSkyStacker. The whirl of stars came out way smoother and I actually got the Milky Way core without fighting the mount. Anyone else find that short subs beat long tracked shots when the ground is junk?
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river_thompson15d ago
The soft ground thing is real, I had the same mess in Utah where my tripod legs just sank a hair every few minutes and my alignment was trash by hour two. What saved me was going the other way, I ran 6 second subs at ISO 3200 and took about 400 of them, then let DeepSkyStacker eat them, and the noise cleaned up way better than I expected. The one thing that bit me was star trails at the edges, so I stopped down to f/4 and that fixed most of it. Short subs are just way more forgiving when the dirt won't hold your setup.
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