I was stacking my deep sky images wrong for two years and a single star told me

I've been using the same basic process to stack my galaxy shots since I started, just letting the software do its thing. Last week, I was looking at a stack of 50 frames of M81 and noticed a faint star that looked like a tiny line, not a dot. That's when it clicked. I had never checked the 'rejection algorithm' settings. I was using sigma clipping, but my sigma value was way too low, so it was keeping all the satellite trails and cosmic ray hits. I changed it to a Winsorized Sigma Clipping with a sigma of 2.5, and the next stack was cleaner than anything I've made. Has anyone else had a specific setting they overlooked that made a huge difference?

3 comments

3 Comments

gibson.sarah9d ago

Cleaner than anything I've made" is a low bar if you never checked basic settings. That's just admitting you weren't doing the work before. A single star shouldn't be your teacher, the manual should.

the_susan9d ago

Wow, @gibson.sarah, who reads the whole manual anyway?

mary_foster929d ago

Seriously... it's like people think manuals are just for decoration. I've seen folks try to use power tools without even knowing where the safety lock is. Then they act shocked when things go wrong or the results are bad. A little reading could save so much time and hassle.