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Stacking astro photos used to make no sense to me until I tried it
I spent like 3 hours taking shots of the Orion Nebula last winter and ended up with a single blurry image I almost deleted. A guy on a forum said to try stacking in DeepSkyStacker and I figured it couldn't hurt. It took me another 2 hours to figure out the settings because my calibration frames were off by a mile. Once I got it right the final result had way more detail than I ever got from a single exposure. How many frames do you usually stack for a decent galaxy shot?
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phoenix_campbell881mo ago
Rowan nailed it with that number. Fifty frames is a solid sweet spot for Andromeda, but the trick is making sure they're all sharp. Throw in a bunch of blurry ones and you'll just smear the core. Also, don't sleep on dark frames if you're shooting from anywhere with light pollution. They clean up the background so the galaxy actually pops instead of looking like a gray smudge. Once you get the hang of it, you'll start noticing you can push fewer frames harder with longer exposures, but that takes more patience with tracking. For a quick session, fifty is way better than the five I started with, and it barely takes longer to process.
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