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Notes from the archive

Practical writing about astrophotography archives, integration time, FITS metadata, and getting more out of the data you've already captured.

• 2026-05-13 · 8 min read

  How to count your astrophotography integration time

  Most imagers can't tell you how many hours they've spent on M31 without going folder-by-folder. Here's why the question is so much harder than it sounds, what the manual approaches look like, and a metadata-first approach that scales to multi-year archives.