Stacking 100 subs changed nothing, one critique fixed my Milky Way shots

I spent 6 months shooting from Roosevelt Lake and piling on 100+ frames, but my core still looked mushy. Someone on Cloudy Nights told me my focus was soft, not my gear, so I tried a Bahtinov mask for the first time. That one $20 tool made my stars pin sharp and suddenly the detail showed up. Anyone else fight bad focus forever before giving the mask a shot?

1 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

1 Comment

davidh8817d ago

The mask helps a ton but it's not really fixing focus by itself, it's just letting you see when focus is off. The real win is that you finally had a way to check it, so you stopped guessing. I chased the same thing for way too long, stacking frame after frame, when my stars were just slightly soft the whole time. One tip though, the mask gets you close, but do a final tweak on a bright star at high zoom without it, since the spike pattern can lie to you a bit on some scopes.

8