I used to roll my eyes at stacking astro photos until someone showed me the Orion Nebula stacked vs single frame

Saw a comparison at a star party last week where one guy stacked 200 frames of the Orion Nebula and the single shot looked like a blurry smudge next to it. Now I get why everyone raves about stacking, what software do you guys use that's not too complicated?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sarah21h ago

I was exactly the same way. My buddy Matt showed me a single 30 second shot of the Andromeda galaxy and then his stacked version from 150 frames. It was night and day. The single frame was just a blurry white smudge but the stacked one had actual spiral arms and dust lanes. That's what finally made me start reading about it. For easy software, I started with DeepSkyStacker. It's free and pretty simple once you get past the initial setup. The hardest part was just sorting my frames and telling it which ones to use.

river35113h ago

Night and day" huh... I mean, yeah the stacked ones look way better but is it really that serious? Feels like you could just enjoy the smudge for what it is and move on with your day.