I finally tried stacking my astro photos and it changed everything but I'm not sure it's always better

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2 Comments

Yeah, 'changed everything' is right. I remember the first time I stacked a few shots of the Milky Way with DeepSkyStacker and my jaw just dropped. But honestly, I've had nights where stacking made things worse, like it introduced this weird gradient or made the stars all wonky. Once I tried stacking a bunch of shots of the moon and it came out looking like a smudgy mess no matter what I did. Sometimes I think it's better to just take one really long exposure and call it a day, especially if you're doing wide field stuff where the stars are already moving fast. Feels like stacking is a tool, not a rule, you know?

carter.casey13d ago

But isn't that more of a technique problem than a stacking problem? A single long exposure on a moving sky is always going to have trailing, even if it looks fine zoomed out. Stacking is the only way to get both clean stars and deep data. If your moon stack came out smudgy, you probably just used the wrong settings or didn't align the frames right. One long shot might look okay on a phone screen, but blow it up and it falls apart compared to a proper stack.