After 3 years of trying, I finally got a sharp photo of the Orion Nebula with just a DSLR and tripod

I kept seeing these amazing photos of M42 online with telescopes and fancy mounts, and I figured there was no way I could get anything decent with my old Canon T3i and a 200mm lens. But last month, I decided to actually try stacking like 300 photos in DeepSkyStacker instead of just taking one long exposure. It took me about 4 hours of messing around with the settings and watching YouTube tutorials at 2am before I realized I had to take shorter subs because of star trailing. The processing part was a whole other nightmare where I spent like 45 minutes just figuring out how to stretch the histogram without blowing out the core. When I finally got that first processed image where you could actually see the nebula shape, I nearly woke up my whole apartment building. Has anyone else spent way too long trying to get a good deep sky shot with just a cheap lens?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_laura5d agoTop Commenter

I used to be one of those people who thought you needed at least a star tracker to even bother trying... but your post honestly changed my mind about that. I have the same Canon T3i actually, and I spent like 2 hours fighting with DeepSkyStacker last weekend because it kept giving me a black screen. Finally got something that sort of looked like a smudge, but it was definitely the nebula.

mason_murray85d ago

Heard that struggle before @the_laura, DSS can be super finicky with the T3i raws!