Showerthought: I used to crank my ISO way up for deep sky shots

Someone on here said my Andromeda photo looked grainy and suggested I stack more exposures at a lower ISO instead. I tried it with 50 lights at ISO 800 instead of 20 at 3200, and the noise reduction was huge. What's your go-to ISO for galaxies?

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3 Comments

zara_west267mo ago

Actually depends on the camera a lot. My old DSLR had way more noise at ISO 800, so pushing to 1600 or 3200 gave me a better signal to work with before stacking. The whole "expose to the right" thing still matters for pulling out faint dust lanes. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather have a slightly noisier single sub that shows the data than a super clean stack of faint subs where the galaxy is barely there.

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tara_williams17mo ago

Read a forum post that basically agreed with you @zara_west26, saying a visible signal beats a clean stack of nothing. Makes sense to me because you can't edit what isn't there. I'd probably pick the noisier single sub too.

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sarahh486mo ago

Yeah, "you can't edit what isn't there" is the whole truth.

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