Stacking 400 shots took me 6 hours because of one dumb mistake

Last month I tried to do my first deep sky photo of the Orion Nebula with a used tracker I bought. I shot 400 frames at 30 seconds each, which took about 3.5 hours just collecting data. Then I sat down to stack them in DeepSkyStacker and every single frame came out with star trails. I checked the tracker, the polar alignment, the camera settings, all of it. Turns out I had left the lens image stabilization on, which the tracker kept fighting the whole night. I lost a full evening and had to reshoot everything with IS off. Second try took 2.5 hours for the capture and maybe 20 minutes to stack clean. Has anyone else wasted a whole night on a tiny camera setting like that?

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evand651d ago

Heard about this exact thing on a podcast once, some guy lost a whole weekend to the same issue. It's wild how the image stabilization just messes with the tracker's whole rhythm, even when you think it's off. I mean, you'd think the camera would give you some kind of warning, right? Good on you for figuring it out, though, that's the kind of mistake you only make once.