400 1" Exposures of Andromeda

[copper wave]

This was my longest exposure yet, and by far the hardest to edit. I spent three hours processing 50 gigabytes of raws (which would later turn into 150gb of tiffs). I will probably not try to go past 200 raws in the future because editing this was honestly hell.

If anyone has any ideas on how to edit this image in a way that preserves more detail, I would love to hear them. (I will also put the unedited and uncropped photo in the comments of this post)

Setup: Sony A7RIV + TTartisan 500mm Lense at f6.3.

[naive crag]

this is the raw stack?

what bortle

[copper wave]

4

is it bad?

[naive crag]

thats pretty good

but 6 minutes at f/6.3 is not gonna yield much detail in the first place

[copper wave]

What should I use then

[naive crag]

wdym

[copper wave]

Is 6.3 too low or to high I guess

[naive crag]

what does it go down to?

[copper wave]

It's 6.3 to 32

Or something

[naive crag]

oh

6.3 is the fastest

[copper wave]

It's just a telephoto lens

Yeah

[naive crag]

really only solution is gonna be more int, which is gonna be a lot easier with a tracker

[copper wave]

Yeah

400 photos edited at once is not sustainable

[naive crag]

my longest untracked shot was also andromeda i did 1200 1" subs lol

[copper wave]

HOLY SHIT

YOU MADLAD

WHAT😭

[copper wave]

Can I see that

[naive crag]

crap it was a while ago ill try to find it

its actually 1050 shots, b7-8

idk how i got the weird colors

right after this one i bought a tracker lmao

pushed me over the edge

[copper wave]

Yeah that doesn't surprise me😭

The 400 I did has kinda done that for me honestly

[copper wave]

That's very good though

Way better post processing

What is your setup?

[naive crag]

sony a7r4 (my dads) and i think i used the sony 135mm f/1.8?

or maybe ths sony 70-200 f/4 i lowkey forgor

my dad has a bunch of sony stuff

[sharp citrus]

last year i did carina nebula untracked. took like 5200x2s images

https://discord.com/channels/794642864218439681/1237587484435677205

https://app.astrobin.com/i/ilhd2g

[copper wave]

how many mp was each photo

like what was the raw file size

[sharp citrus]

26mb

[copper wave]

lucky

my raws are like 112💀

[sharp citrus]

💀

[copper wave]

it gets a bit problematic to edit on my 150 gb of ssd

🕊️

[naive crag]

how is it even that small

[copper wave]

i have a terabyte of storage but also a bunch of other stuff like games

[copper wave]

do you remember what iso you used

i used 3200 and i worry that it was too low

[naive crag]

i think 1600?

the only thing iso does is change read noise

if ur iso is too low to see anything in the subexposure thats fine, you can stretch it more after the stack

but read noise goes down as iso goes up so 3200 should be chill

[copper wave]

thats exactly what i used. perfect🔥

i will say i could probably go a bit higher given the low light performance of sony's full frames

but yeah

[copper wave]

wait i didnt even see this before but we used the exact same camera