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.

2 comments

2 Comments

fiona_young21d 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_joel21d 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.