Tried stacking 60 frames on a nebula instead of my usual 15...

I always just did 15 to save time and figured more was overkill. Last week I tried 60 frames on the Orion Nebula from my backyard in Austin. The detail in the dust lanes was incredible, way more than I expected. Guess that old timer at the star party knew what he was talking about... Has anyone else experimented with way more frames than usual and seen a big jump in quality?

3 comments

3 Comments

grace_wright12d ago

Whoa, I gotta disagree with you a bit on this one. More frames definitely isn't always better, especially if your alignment is off or you're dealing with light pollution. @reese124, I see where you're coming from with the whole overheating thing, but stacking is more about averaging out noise than just pretending it's a single long shot. For Orion, those dust lanes are faint, so sure, more frames help, but I've hit a point where adding frames past 30 just gives me diminishing returns and a lot of wasted time in processing. 15 can be totally fine if your sky is dark and steady, but if you're in a suburban spot like Austin, then yeah, going higher might just bury the signal in more garbage.

reese12412d ago

Read somewhere that stacking is basically like taking a longer exposure without your camera sensor overheating. Makes sense when you think about it. I bet the Orion dust lanes really popped with that many frames.

henderson.oscar11d ago

But doesn't the quality of your sub exposures matter more than just how many you grab? I've seen people stack 200 noisy 10-second shots and still get worse results than someone who carefully dials in 20 three-minute subs with good tracking. Seems like we focus so much on quantity that we forget the real gain comes from capturing clean data in the first place.