That 'just increase exposure' advice cost me a whole week of editing

A guy in the comments on my last Orion photo kept saying my nebula shot was underexposed and I should just bump the ISO in post. I tried it on three separate captures from my trip to Cherry Springs back in March, and every attempt just turned the background into a noisy mess. Turns out the real problem was my tracking mount was off by a few arcseconds, not the exposure at all. I finally fixed the polar alignment and got the same target with half the editing time. Has anyone else had online advice send you down a rabbit hole that made things worse?

1 comments

1 Comment

miamitchell23d ago

Wait, is that the same kind of advice people gave me about my moon shots back when I first started? I used to think cranking the ISO was the fix for everything, but honestly, it just made my photos look like garbage with all that grain. Then I read something about tracking errors and realized my whole problem was the mount drifting, not the camera settings. Now I check my polar alignment like it's a religion, and yeah, it's way less editing time and way more sharp stars. That commenter probably meant well, but they were diagnosing the wrong thing, which is super common in astro forums. Glad you figured it out, but sorry you lost a week to that rabbit hole, been there myself.