cooper.phoenix•23d agoProlific Poster

Just figured out how stacking photos works for astronomy shots

I was taking single exposures of Andromeda and they looked so noisy and flat. Then I tried stacking 20 shots in DeepSkyStacker with my Canon T7 and it cleaned up the background noise like crazy. Anyone use a different stacking program for their galaxy shots?

3 comments

3 Comments

wilson.kelly23d ago

Oh man you are speaking my language right now. I had the exact same thing happen when I first tried shooting M31 with my T7. Those single frames looked like garbage and I almost gave up on astro completely until I stumbled onto stacking. Twenty subs was my magic number too for getting rid of that awful noise. I ended up switching to Sequator instead of DeepSkyStacker because it handles the color better on my Canon files without me having to fiddle with as many sliders. What really blew my mind though was when I bumped my subs up to 60 seconds each with a cheap intervalometer from Amazon. The extra time per shot let me pull out way more of the dust lanes in Andromeda's arms. You should try shooting 30 or 40 subs next clear night and see how much deeper the detail gets.

daniel_walker22d ago

Man I was totally in the "single frames are fine" camp for way too long. Stacking always seemed like extra work for minimal gain but after chen.casey mentioned Kappa-Sigma clipping I gave it another shot on some old Orion Nebula data and holy crap the difference was night and day. I was doing 20x45 second subs before and now I push for at least 50x60 seconds with my intervalometer and the noise just melts away. That Sequator recommendation is interesting too, I might have to try it since DSS keeps messing with my color balance on darker targets.

chen.casey23d ago

Yeah DeepSkyStacker is pretty solid but have you messed with the stacking settings at all? Kappa-Sigma clipping makes a huge difference compared to the default average method, especially if you have a few bad frames with satellite trails or something. What kind of integration time were you getting with those 20 subs, like 30 seconds each or longer? Also check if your T7 has built-in intervalometer or you're using an external one to avoid touching the camera between shots.