My old photo of the Veil Nebula from 2012 still holds up somehow

I took a 30 minute exposure of the Veil Nebula back in 2012 with my old Canon 60D and a basic 8 inch reflector. At the time I thought it was a total mess because I had no autoguiding and my polar alignment was sloppy. I actually forgot about it for years until I found it on an old hard drive last month. I ran it through some modern free software and I was shocked how much detail was hiding in the data. It's not as sharp as what people get today with $3,000 rigs but it reminded me that you don't need perfect gear to capture something beautiful. Has anyone else gone back to old photos and found hidden gems?

2 comments

2 Comments

tyler614d ago

That old 60D and 8 inch reflector combo reminds me of my first deep sky attempts with a modded Canon 450D and a 6 inch newt. I spent a whole winter shooting the Orion Nebula with zero autoguiding and just a polar scope that was probably off by a few degrees. The subs were all over the place, trailing in every direction. I stacked them in DeepSkyStacker a few years later with darks and flats I actually kept, and it turned out way better than I expected. The core was blown out but the outer dust trails were actually visible. It taught me that a lot of the magic is in the post processing and the data you think is junk might just need a fresh look. I bet if you tried stacking with some new rejection algorithms you might pull out even more detail.

bennett.noah14d ago

Honestly I'd argue bad data is just bad data and no amount of fancy stacking will fix a fundamentally flawed capture.