Took me 5 years to figure out I was stacking my astro photos all wrong

I used to just layer them on top of each other in Photoshop and wonder why I kept getting blurry stars. Then a guy on a forum mentioned using median stacking in DeepSkyStacker and showed me his result from the same Orion Nebula data I had sitting on my drive from 2019. Total game changer, has anyone else had a similar "oh duh" moment with their processing?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_lisa21d ago

Yeah median stacking changed everything for me too

brookefox21d ago

Median stacking changed everything" - nah, I think people overhype it. Honestly, I've been stacking my astro photos manually with layers and masks in Photoshop for years, and my shots of the Milky Way core come out sharp as anything. If your alignment is off, median stacking's just gonna smooth out the good detail along with the noise, and you lose that crisp texture on the nebula. Plus, I've seen guys spend hours tweaking settings in DeepSkyStacker when they could've just taken a few more subs and stacked them the old way.