Stacking 200 photos of M31 took me 3 evenings to get right

I finally tried deep sky stacking for the first time on Andromeda. Captured 200 frames over two nights, but my registration kept failing because I forgot to turn off the telescope tracking during the darks. Took me a third evening to realize the fix was just taking 20 dark frames with the lens cap on and the same ISO. The final stack came out way sharper than the single frames I was used to. Anyone else have a dumb stacking mistake that cost them a whole night?

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stellanelson1mo ago

Spent three nights once convinced my camera was broken because every flat frame came out with weird vignetting. Turns out I left the lens hood on and it was casting a shadow I kept trying to fix in software. Wasted more time cropping that mess than just retaking the flats. Dark frames are like that though, they always humble you right when you think you got it figured out. At least you only lost one night, I lost a full moon weekend to a plastic tube.

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