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Changed my mind about star stacking after a bad photo
Used to think stacking was cheating somehow. Then I took a 30 second exposure of Andromeda and got nothing but noise. A guy on here showed me his stacked version from the same camera and it changed my whole view. Anyone else fight against stacking then finally give in?
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mila_campbell2520d ago
The 30 second thing is actually pretty standard for Andromeda depending on your lenses and tracking. You need way more than just a single long exposure to pull out the dust lanes and the core details. It's not just about time, it's about stacking multiple shorter exposures to beat down the noise and bring up signal. Once I saw a properly aligned stack with darks and flats processed in something like Siril or DeepSkyStacker, it clicked for me how much data gets hidden in those noisy frames.
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milaw1420d ago
Did one of my buddies actually go through this? He was convinced stacking was just cheating in Photoshop or something. He spent like three nights trying to get the Orion Nebula with a single 2 minute exposure on his unmodified DSLR and got a big orange blob with a tiny smudge of color. Finally I lent him my copy of DeepSkyStacker and showed him how to do like 60 second subs at ISO 800. After he processed his first proper stack, he texted me a photo of the nebula with the wings actually visible and it was like night and day. He even admitted he wasted like two months of clear skies being stubborn about it.
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Wait, you actually went from 30 seconds to a proper stack? That's a HUGE difference.
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