Hot take: I used to think stacking multiple long exposures was just showing off technique

A guy on here pointed out my Crab Nebula shot had noise in the outer nebula that a median stack of 30 subs at 2 minutes each would fix, and after trying it the detail in those wispy edges finally popped without the grain I'd been fixing in post.

3 comments

3 Comments

fiona_young2mo ago

Wait did you also have that noise problem in the outer edges before trying it? Yeah I totally used to think stacking was just for bragging rights too until I tried it on my Andromeda shots and the difference was NIGHT AND day.

the_joel2mo ago

Read somewhere that stacking works because it averages out the random sensor noise, which makes sense when you think about how each frame has different noise patterns. Tried it on some dark sky shots and yeah, the outer edges cleaned up way better than I expected.

bettyfox28d ago

Forty seven shots of the Milky Way core was what finally sold me on stacking... I thought I had a bad lens with all that noise in the corners but it was just the sensor doing its thing. Once I stacked those frames in Sequator the background went from grainy to almost silky smooth, and the stars actually looked like points instead of little blobs. The noise pattern really does change frame to frame, so when you average them out it cancels all that random stuff out pretty nice. I still keep a few single shots for comparison because the difference is honestly kind of wild to look at...