I spent 6 months stacking my astro subs by hand before I saw the flaws in my own photos

Amy Foster · 2026-10-04T01:45:04.529152+00:00

I used to think more subs automatically meant a cleaner picture, so I stacked 300 frames of the Orion Nebula from my backyard near Denver without ever checking them first. The tipping point was a guy at a star party who pointed out that half my shots had thin clouds rolling through, which was why my final image looked washed out no matter how much I stretched it. Now I blink through every single frame in DeepSkyStacker and toss anything with a FWHM over 3.5, and my last 90 minute run came out sharper than any of my old 4 hour piles. It kills me that I wasted so many nights thinking I needed more data when the real problem was junk data. Do you all cull before stacking, or just let the software sort it out?

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I spent 6 months stacking my astro subs by hand before I saw the flaws in my own photos | Astronomy Photos - SMM Buzz