Here is a cropped image where I used an incorrect or outdated flat.
It’s no secret that calibration frames are essential in astrophotography.
In the past, I’ve often used older flats, and many times, it worked surprisingly well.
This time, after a few months, I pulled my Vixen VC200L out of the box and captured some lights at night. I integrated them right away—initially using old flats from the same telescope and camera, just aged.
The result was terrible 🙂 The next day, I took fresh flats and want to briefly demonstrate the difference here.
In both cases, I applied the same processing steps in PixInsight, keeping it to an absolute minimum. I only removed the background, performed deconvolution and noise reduction. Finally, I gently stretched the images.
