Vent: I was stacking my astro shots wrong for months until I saw a guy's post from Flagstaff

I kept getting weird noise patterns in my stacked Milky Way photos, and it turned out I was using the wrong calibration frame order. Someone on Cloudy Nights said they always do darks before flats, and that fixed it for me. Anyone else run into this with their processing workflow?

3 comments

3 Comments

hannahm391mo ago

That order got me too.

viola_ward1mo ago

Yeah, but the software thing is a factor too, @hannahm39. I tried three different stacking programs on the same data set once and got three different results, which is wild. The order you stack in matters a lot because some programs weight the first frames more heavily. I think a lot of people don't realize the default settings can mess with the output more than the actual noise does.

elliot_johnson311mo ago

Ever wonder if the software itself is part of the problem? I've seen different stacking programs handle the same frames in weird ways.