Just counted 4,827 stars in a single 30-second exposure from my backyard

I was messing around with my Canon and a cheap tripod near Tucson last weekend and the number blew my mind. Has anyone else tried manually counting stars in their photos or am I just that bored?

3 comments

3 Comments

ross.sean3d ago

Have you considered that some of those "stars" might actually be satellites or even distant planes? I live in a Bortle 4 zone and started noticing how many moving lights show up in long exposures. After checking mine against Stellarium, I found about 8% were human-made objects. Tucson has that military airspace nearby too so probably more than usual lol. Your count is still wild though, most people don't realize how many objects are actually up there. Makes you wonder how much of the night sky we're accidentally photobombing with our own tech.

diana3143d ago

Wait, wait, wait. 8% of the things you caught in your photos were human-made? That's way higher than I would have guessed, even for a darker sky zone. I figured maybe 1 or 2 percent, tops. You're telling me one out of every dozen little lights up there is just our junk or some plane? That's honestly kind of a bummer, makes the sky feel a lot more crowded than it looks with your bare eyes. I guess that's what happens when you start really paying attention, the quiet sky gets a lot more noisy.

the_jason1d ago

Man, ross.sean is spot on. I had the exact same shock when I started stacking my shots. I was doing a 2-minute exposure of the Milky Way from a spot in the desert outside Phoenix and counted 211 lights in the frame. After pulling up Stellarium, I found 19 of them were either Starlink trains or commercial planes. It felt like cheating. You go out thinking you're getting a clean shot of nature and half your work is just digitally removing our own junk from the photo. Tucson's airspace is definitely a factor too, I get at least 3 or 4 planes in every 30-second frame out here.