Astrophotography - What not to do.

[Jarvo]

Hi Guys, though I'd share a private moment with you all....

Monday night went out to capture a decent image at M57 following my first attempt.

I took 20 Dark frames plus 20 x 1 minute exposures at iso800 with the intention of processing in Deep Sky Stacker.

Following morning, flicked through the shots on the camera and decided to delete the test shots.

Promptly deleted all of the test shots plus the shots of M57 (which looked pretty promising). Whole evening's work lost. :crybaby:

I'll leave you to guess what my wife called me seeing as this is a family forum. :shock:

Went to work in a daze hardly believing what I'd just done.

Now its raining........

Jarvo

[barkis]

That is a sickening accident Jarvo, I say accident, because there's no way you are going to that intentionally. Things like that are commonplace really, pretty heartbreaking, but you just have to chalk it to you know what, and hope you never do it again. There are no guarantees though.

Ron.

[trevboyd]

Hi Jarvo

All may not be lost... You should be able to put your memory card in a card reader and use a file recovery program to get them back. There are some free ones available on the web, or I have one I can email to you tomorrow if you like. That's assuming you haven't used the card to take more photos since!

Trev

[Psychobilly]

As Trev said all may not be lost you may be able to undelete your images. you may get some back even if the card has been "used" since.

Having been there and got the "t-shirt" , I know its very easy to be wise after the fact but as part of my workflow the very first thing i do is copy all the images from the card to the pc's HDD into a bulk directory. I have a few external drives and backup the bulk folder to these and also use DVD's as another backup medium.

I then copy the images into a session specific folder (so I have 3 copies - card,bulk and session) I then "cull" from the session specific folder.

When is processing the stacked/aligned images I always rename at various stages usually with a filename that is descriptive of the image and processing to date.

Best of luck with the data recovery if it's still an option.

[Vega]

Oh Jarvo.... ouch, that had to hurt. I guess there were a number of expletives expressed when you realised what you did.

I think in the interests of public safety, 24 hours in a straight jacket would be in order had I done that

Matt

[Jarvo]

Thanks for the pointers guys - I had no idea there were programmes out there.

Just downloaded one and kicked it off.....now my batteries died.

Wheres that straightjacket? :laughing3:

I'll post the results when done.

Jarvo

[centroid]

You aren't the first, and certainly won't be the last :nono:

Not sure why you feel that you need 20 dark frames though :? , if I use a dark frame at all with my H9C images, I only ever bother to take one.

Dave

[kpax]

I hope you get them back mate. Chin up all may not be lost yet.

kpax

[Ant]

I did a reasonable image of M31 last year. First off I took (and subtracted) 1 dark frame. The resulting image was quite nice. When I re did the image subtracting a stack of 40 dark frames the result was much better.

Maybe it depends on the camera, certianly for what I have the more the better!

Good luck in recovering the images.

Ant

[DeanWatson]

Absolutely - classical theory says you should take one dark for every light (lthough admittedly I only ever do 5 or six most of the time!). If I don't do flat frames for some reason I find the free downlaod of Pixinsight very useful.

[trevboyd]

I find the more darks the better, and I agree - pixinsight is pretty good at cleaning up instead of using flats.

Trev

[RobH]

The reason you need to do lots of darks, is exactly the same as why you do lots of lights.....signal to noise.

When you apply a dark, it will contain a certain amount of noise.

This noise will be added to the final dark subtracted image. If you take a lot of darks, the random noise element will be pushed way back.

That said, with my Atik 16HR, I often don't bother with darks as there's so little noise anyway. This is the same for the SXVH9, which has the same chip.

Cheers

Rob