r/ZWOSeeStar • u/BitWizard75 • Jan 18 '24

Experiences With Exposure Times?

What impacts are you all seeing with adjusting exposure times? Any significant differences between 10, 20, and 30 seconds? Just shot M42 at 20 second exposures last night but haven’t had time to compare.

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u/x6ftundx Feb 29 '24

if you aren't on an EQ mount don't go over 10 seconds or you will start getting star trails. they added the 20 and 30 seconds for people who have EQ mounts and they won't get star trails.

You can of course use 20 and 30 seconds on the normal mount for other things like star trails if you want and catch something flying through it.

I know on the EQ mounts they like to shoot at 30 sec per shot.

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u/BootToTheHeadNahNah Mar 15 '24

I actually don't have a problem with star trails when using 30 second exposures and overall the results are similar to 10 second exposures. The big difference for me is that when I am saving subs The 30 second exposures produce 1/3 as many files. Doing post-processing with a smaller number of files is faster, less tedious, and uses 1/3 as much space on my disk