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Timelapse stacking with a $15 intervalometer wrecked my color balance
I tried shooting 400 frames of the Milky Way over Lake Tahoe last Saturday and the cheap intervalometer fired at random intervals, so when I stacked them the stars turned into weird purple trails and now I have to figure out if it was the device or my settings, has anyone else had this issue with those budget remotes?
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the_shane12d ago
The random firing is doing way more damage than just messing up your timing, it's basically scrambling how the stacking software aligns the frames. When the intervals jump around, the star positions shift between shots in a way that's not smooth, so the alignment algorithm starts pulling in data from different points in the rotation. That's where the purple comes from, it's not a white balance issue, it's the stars smearing across the color channels because they don't line up cleanly. You might be able to salvage it by sorting the frames by actual capture time if your files have timestamps, then stacking only the ones that are close together. But honestly, those budget remotes are notorious for this, I had one that would fire three times in a row and then skip ten seconds, totally useless for anything beyond a quick test. If you're set on shooting that many frames again, I'd just use the built-in intervalometer on your camera if it has one, or even shoot in bursts and sort it out later, it saves you a headache.
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