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Am I the only one who hit 100 hours of total exposure time and felt weird about it
I finally added up all my saved frames in DeepSkyStacker last night and the number came out to just over 100 hours of total integration time since I started this hobby back in 2019. Sitting at my desk in my apartment in Phoenix with the AC running, I just stared at that number for a while. My first ever shot was a blurry M42 from a light polluted parking lot in Tempe with a camera I borrowed from my brother. Now I have hundreds of subs of the same galaxy from four different backyards. It does not feel like 100 hours. It feels like maybe 20 nights of standing outside in the cold, but the math says otherwise. I guess what got me is how the same target looks so different after you keep stacking more data on it, and how much of that time was just me messing up focus or forgetting to plug in the dew heater. Anyway, for folks who have been at this longer, did you ever total up your hours and get surprised by the number?
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mary_west11d ago
Kept reading your post and had to point one thing out, those saved frames in DeepSkyStacker are not the same as real exposure time. DSS only keeps what you actually fed into it, so if you threw out subs because of clouds, planes, or bad tracking, that time is gone. I have the same issue, my folders are full of junk I never stacked, so my real number is way higher than what DSS shows. Also the "same galaxy from four backyards" thing, that is what gets me, not the hours but the fact that you can add another 10 hours and barely see a change. So yeah, 100 hours tracked is a lot, but your true time under the sky is probably even more, lol.
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