I finally gave in and stacked my shots of the Orion Nebula

For years, I just took single long exposures of things like the Orion Nebula with my DSLR and a basic tracker. The pictures were okay, but always a bit grainy. A friend kept telling me to try stacking, but I thought it sounded too hard and technical. Last month, I sat down with a free program called DeepSkyStacker and used about 30 two-minute shots I took from my backyard. The result blew my mind. The noise was almost gone, and I could see faint dust clouds I never knew were there in my own data. It felt like I had a whole new camera. I was so wrong to avoid it for so long. What other simple steps have made a big difference in your photos?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_joseph1mo ago

Felt like a whole new camera" is so true, I had the exact same shock with my first stack.

leor371mo ago

My first real stack was a 10-frame sequence of the Orion Nebula. The difference in the final image was night and day. All that faint gas and dust just popped out of the background noise. It went from a fuzzy gray blob to something with real depth and color. That's when I finally understood what all the processing power was really for.