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The night sky over Great Basin made me delete 3 years of backyard shots
Went camping at Great Basin National Park last month with my 8 inch dob and a cheap star tracker. I've been shooting from my driveway in Sacramento for 3 years, stacking hundreds of frames, fighting every streetlight in the neighborhood. First night out there I pointed at Andromeda and just stood there, jaw on the ground. The dust lanes were just THERE, no gradient surgery, no hours in Photoshop. If you've only ever shot from a city, you're not doing astrophotography, you're doing light pollution cleanup. What's the darkest site you've dragged your gear to?
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joseph_sanchez12d ago
Have you ever heard of the Bortle scale? I read a piece a while back about how most people in cities never see better than a class 8 or 9 sky and think that is just what night looks like. The writer said the Milky Way is basically gone for two thirds of the country now. I grew up outside Reno so I had it decent, but the first time I went to a true dark site it was like someone turned the universe's brightness knob up. Your point about doing light pollution cleanup instead of actual photography is dead on. I read that most beginner guides skip over this and just tell you to buy more filters, which feels like treating the symptom instead of the problem.
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