Nearly ruined my rig because I ignored flat calibration frames for 2 years

I've been shooting deep sky photos since 2021 and thought my processing workflow was solid. Last week I compared two sessions of M31 - one with flats and one without - and the difference blew my mind. My old stacked images had this faint gradient ring that I always blamed on my light pollution filter. Turns out it was just dust bunnies on my sensor that flats would have fixed in 30 seconds. I probably threw away hundreds of hours of usable data doing it wrong the whole time. Has anyone else made this mistake and how long did it take you to figure it out?

3 comments

3 Comments

wesley18119d ago

A little dramatic, it's not like you were shooting without darks or bias frames. Dust bunnies are annoying but you probably still got some decent images out of that data.

the_grace18d ago

Wait til you hear what happened to my buddy Mark @wesley181. He spent a whole night imaging the Andromeda galaxy, got everything set up perfectly, only to find out his main mirror had a massive thumbprint right in the center of the frame. He didn't notice until he was stacking the subs and saw this giant blurry circle ruining every single frame. He had to toss like 3 hours of data because he didn't catch it during the session. At least dust bunnies you can usually clone stamp out, that thumbprint was a total write off.

noahmartin17d agoTop Commenter

One time I left my lens cap on for 45 minutes of a meteor shower. Didn't realize til I checked the camera.