My deep sky stack took 4 hours to process because of one dumb setting

I spent all night shooting M31 with my Celestron 8SE and then sat down to stack it in DeepSkyStacker, thinking it would be 20 minutes tops. Turns out I had dithering turned off so all 120 subs had walking noise that took forever to fix in Photoshop. Has anyone else had a simple setting blow up their whole processing time like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

jana17912d ago

Felt that pain hard. I once spent six hours trying to figure out why my flats were completely inverted, turns out I had the calibration frames in the wrong folder. Just a little checkbox somewhere and everything falls apart. Hope you got a good M31 out of it at least.

ward.fiona12d ago

That "just a little checkbox" bit really hits, but here's what gets me about this hobby. We spend all this money on fancy gear and software, but the real enemy is always something stupid like a folder path or a file name. You'd think with all the tech we have, something as basic as "put the calibration frames in the right place" would be foolproof by now. Is it really that hard to make a system that just checks if your flats are even in the right orientation before you waste six hours? I swear half of astrophotography is just fighting against your own computer setup. At least with cloudy nights you know it's not your fault, but when it's a checkbox you missed, that's a different kind of frustrating.