Borrowed a tracking mount for a week and now I'm ruined for tripod shots

Last month my buddy let me use his Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer for a few nights out at Cherry Springs and I got crisp 5 minute exposures of Orion. Now I'm back to my static tripod and every 30 second shot just feels like a waste of time. How do you guys go back to untracked widefield without getting frustrated?

3 comments

3 Comments

king.ruby1mo ago

oh man, i feel this so hard lol. that first night back on a static tripod is like getting a fancy coffee machine at your friend's place and then going home to instant coffee. i watched a tutorial on how to do the "500 rule" with my 35mm and it just feels like i'm taking snapshots when i know what my setup could actually do. i literally sat in my backyard for an hour the other night trying to convince myself that untracked Andromeda looks fine but it absolutely does not. guess i'm saving up now cause ignorance was bliss.

ryan_nguyen1mo ago

ngl that "ignorance was bliss" part hit me right in the wallet lol. i remember my first few weeks of astro where i thought my kit lens photos were actually good. then i saw a single tracked shot of the Orion nebula and it was like realizing you've been wearing your shirt inside out all day. i actually tried to stack 200 untracked 2 second subs of the Pleiades once and ended up with something that looked like a blurry ghost sneezed on my screen. it's brutal how fast this hobby goes from "this is cool" to "i need a star tracker or i'm quitting.

lindaw121mo ago

You ever try to explain to someone why you're sitting outside in the cold for an hour just to get a blurry smudge of a galaxy? lol. I had a neighbor once ask me if I was okay because I was out there with my camera and a blanket, just staring up at the sky, and I had to tell them no, I'm actually chasing a fuzzy little blob that looks like a dirty cotton ball in the viewfinder. It's such a weird hobby sometimes, but that feeling of untracked disappointment is real... it's like you're stuck with a Polaroid at a wedding while everyone else has a pro photographer. I remember when I first got into it, I spent a whole weekend trying to stack untracked shots of the Milky Way, and the result looked like someone spilled salt on a black t-shirt. So yeah, you're not alone in that savings account emptiness lol.