Update: Heard a guy at the star party say 'processing ruins the real sky' and I gotta disagree

I was at the public viewing night at the Griffith Observatory last month and overheard a guy telling his friend that any photo with stacking or color adjustments is 'fake' and not real astronomy. He said the only 'true' photos are single, unedited exposures. I get the purist view, but that take is just wrong. My own rig is a basic DSLR on a tracker, and a single 30-second shot of the Orion Nebula just looks like a faint gray smudge. It took stacking 45 minutes of those shots and a basic stretch in Siril to actually see the reds and blues that are objectively there. The data is real, the processing just reveals it. Our eyes can't gather light for hours, but our cameras can. What's the point of having the tech if we don't use it to show what's actually in the sky? For those who do deep sky stuff, what's your line between 'revealing' and 'inventing' with your processing workflow?

2 comments

2 Comments

murray.troy10d ago

Ugh, that's like saying using a telescope is cheating.

taragrant10d ago

Isn't this just the same old "natural is better" bias? People say the same thing about using filters on photos or editing a podcast to remove background noise. The tool isn't faking reality, it's just helping us see past our own limits.