Appreciation post: I tried stacking 200 shots of the Orion Nebula from my backyard

I used my old DSLR and a basic star tracker, expecting a fuzzy mess. Instead, the stacked image showed way more detail than I thought possible, especially in the faint outer gas clouds. It took about 3 hours of total exposure time and a lot of patience with the free software. Has anyone else been surprised by what you can pull out of a ton of short exposures?

2 comments

2 Comments

hunt.rowan12d ago

Stack more exposures than you think you need. I pushed my old camera to 500 subs for a target and the extra data really smoothed out the background noise. Just make sure your tracking holds up for that long.

tylerw9212d ago

Absolutely, going way over on sub count is a game changer. My last project was a faint nebula and I ended up with over 700 frames from a basic DSLR. The difference in the final edit was crazy, it went from a grainy mess to something actually clean. You're totally right about the tracking though, I had to toss a bunch of frames because my mount wobbled. But the ones that stuck made the editing so much easier. It's a pain to collect all that data but it pays off.