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?

4 comments

4 Comments

blair9902mo agoMost Upvoted

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

david_walker972mo agoMost Upvoted

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.

juliaa653d ago

Barn door trackers are the sweet spot for folks who don't want to drop rent money on a mount.

dakotag262mo 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.