from Hacker News

Is Astrophotography Without Tracking Possible? (2022)

by karlperera on 5/21/25, 10:22 AM with 25 comments

• by hengheng on 5/24/25, 10:35 PM

  Nowadays, most people who say astrophotography don't mean Deep Sky photography, hunting planets, nebula and galaxies. It's mostly the sky over a wide-angle landscape. "Astrophotography" happens at < 20mm.

  Totally viable untracked. The classic 14mm prime has gone from f2.8 to f1.8 to f1.4, and sensors have become really good at high sensitivity for a 15 second exposure. Quite often, that's enough.

  The hairy part is when it's not quite enough, and exposures have to be stacked. I have a crop sensor camera (canon 1.6x, so 40% area) with an f/2 lens that I like to step down further, and a good Starscape this way will take 10-40 exposures. I can stack those no problem, but it's trees on the horizon that are problematic. The ground stack and the sky stack have to clash, and a complex shaped border will always look photoshopped, because it is.

  Old school Deep Sky is losing its appeal due to a) pictures being available online, meaning that you've already seen the better version of the same photo, and b) the images being sterile and without context, with no relation to the photographer's story. Milky Way in a national park says "I've been there!" in a way that a shot of the Whirlpool Galaxy just can't.

• by pppone on 5/24/25, 9:17 PM

  Yes, and it is already happening in professional astronomy. For example, the "Antarctic Tianmu Plan" [0] have shown that you can successfully capture non-trailed images without using tracking mounts by using drift-scanning CCDs—basically letting the sky move across your sensor while the detector is read out at the same rate.

  [0] - https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3019468

• by astroimagery on 5/25/25, 9:05 PM

  I also don't agree that deep sky astro is losing its appeal and that is indeed what I am interested in. I think that each astrophotgrapher has his own style which is totally unique and if you check some of my image then you'll see what I mean. https://astroimagery.com/astrophotography-deep-sky-images/

• by jameslk on 5/25/25, 12:05 AM

  Isn't trackerless astrophotography one of the main use cases for software that can do stacking like Siril [0] and similar tools [1] out there?

  0. https://siril.org/

  1. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAstrophotography/comments/1b7fz3...

• by incomingpain on 5/21/25, 11:08 AM

  Tracking is needed for when you want to do say 15 second exposures.

  The new technique for astrophotography isnt long exposures. Its about fast exposures in an attempt to maximize good atmospheric wobble.

• by shmerl on 5/25/25, 3:08 AM

  What about using a reflector telescope like a Dobsonian? Would it be able to capture more light lowering the requirement for exposure time?