fisher.adam•1mo agoProlific Poster

Hit 1,000 hours of deep sky imaging and honestly it felt weird

Hit 1,000 hours of deep sky imaging and honestly it felt weird. Tbh I never thought I'd get to 1,000 hours of total exposure time on my astrophotography setup. I started back in 2021 with a cheap DSLR and a basic tracking mount, and I just kept adding more nights. Last week I checked my logging app and saw the number - it hit me harder than I expected. Like, a thousand hours of my life spent looking at blurry galaxies and nebula through a computer screen. It matters because I remember the first 50 hours where every single image was garbage, and now I've got a decent shot of the Veil Nebula that I actually feel proud of. But also, most of those hours were cloudy or fighting tracking errors or deleting bad subs - only maybe 200 hours were 'good' data. Has anyone else hit a big number like that and felt more tired than excited about it?

3 comments

3 Comments

nina_jenkins1mo ago

That 1,000 hour mark includes all that troubleshooting and bad weather though. The actual good exposure time is probably way lower than you think since you said only 200 hours were usable data.

jenny_coleman1mo agoMost Upvoted

Are you seriously counting that troubleshooting and bad weather as part of the exposure though? Honestly, if you spend 800 hours fixing gear and waiting out clouds, that's still time you learned something, even if it's just how to deal with your equipment failing. The actual usable data might be 200 hours, but that's 200 hours of pure, no-compromise photons hitting the sensor, not some diluted average. Those 800 hours of headaches taught you exactly what your setup can and can't handle, which makes the 200 hours way more valuable than if you got it all in one perfect night. Ngl, that's a better deal than having a perfect night and never knowing how to fix things when they go wrong. The 1000 hour number is a badge of survival, not just a time log.

victor_adams1mo ago

Jenny's got a point though, 200 hours of clean data is still solid regardless of the setup struggles.