PSA: That 'star tracker' photo you loved might be a stack of 300 frames, not one shot

Ran into a guy at the Dark Sky Festival in Torrey last October who swore his single-exposure Milky Way was 'natural talent' but later admitted it was a 4-hour composite stack. So which side are you on - do long exposures with stacking count as real astrophotography, or is it just cheating with software?

2 comments

2 Comments

rivera.susan9d ago

So what's the cutoff then? I mean if stacking 300 frames is cheating, is using a star tracker at all also cheating or is it just the software that makes it feel dirty? Be curious where people draw the line between "processing" and "manufacturing" an image.

ellis.diana9d ago

@rivera.susan stacking is just digital cheating in my book lol. if you need 300 frames and software to get the shot then you're not really taking a photo, you're building one in post. i get that processing is part of the game but at some point it stops being photography and starts being digital art.