cora_martinez•1mo agoProlific Poster

I hit 500 hours of total exposure on my Andromeda galaxy image

So I've been working on this one shot of M31 for what feels like forever, just adding data whenever the sky was clear. I finally added up all the subs from my backyard in Tucson and the remote rig... and it came to 501 hours. That number just hit me. It's not like a pretty round number, but it's over half a thousand hours of my telescope just collecting light. I started this project over a year ago, and seeing all that time stacked into one picture makes the faint outer dust lanes just pop in a way I never thought I could get from the city. It feels less like a photo and more like a record of patience now. Has anyone else ever been surprised by how much total time they put into a single target?

2 comments

2 Comments

robin6581mo ago

I mean, that's insane. I had the same shock when my M81 stack hit like 300 hours and I just sat there staring at the number.

thomas831mo ago

It's just data on a screen to me. The real shock comes from seeing the final image, not the hours spent collecting photons. My best results have often come from much shorter integrations where the conditions were just right.