Vent: My neighbor said you need a $5k mount for good deep sky shots, but my old tripod worked fine

Last week, a guy down the street saw me setting up my camera in the driveway and gave me a whole speech about his $5,000 equatorial mount. He said my basic tripod was 'pointless' for the Orion Nebula. Three years ago, I started with that same tripod and a 30-second exposure from my backyard in Tucson. Last month, I stacked 50 of those shots and got a clean, detailed image of the Horsehead Nebula. Has anyone else gotten decent results without dropping a fortune on gear?

3 comments

3 Comments

blair99029d ago

Read a cool article about people using barn door trackers for under a hundred bucks, totally proves dakotag26 wrong about needing expensive gear.

david_walker9729d ago

Yeah but that's still a tracker, just a cheap one. It lets you take longer shots than a tripod. The real argument is tracking vs no tracking at all. A barn door rig proves you need some kind of tracking to get anywhere.

dakotag2629d ago

Look, I get being proud of your work, but your neighbor has a point. A basic tripod just can't track the stars, so you're stuck with super short exposures before star trails ruin the shot. Stacking fifty blurry, noisy thirty-second frames is a workaround, not a real solution. For faint details in objects like the Horsehead, you need those long, guided exposures that only a proper mount can give you. The difference in clarity and depth is night and day, no pun intended. Trying to shoot deep sky without tracking is like trying to fill a bathtub with a teaspoon.