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?

3 comments

3 Comments

zara_west2618d 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.

tara_williams118d agoMost Upvoted

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.

sarahh4811d ago

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