Just realized I've been stacking my deep sky photos wrong this whole time

I was trying to get a good shot of the Orion Nebula from my backyard in Austin last week, and the stars kept looking like little lines instead of points. I'd been taking 30 second shots and stacking about 50 of them, thinking more was better. Then I saw a forum comment where someone said if your stars trail, your single exposure is too long, no matter how many you stack. I felt so dumb. I dropped down to 15 second shots and stacked 120 of them, and the difference was night and day. Has anyone else had a basic rule click for them way later than it should have?

3 comments

3 Comments

victor_ward10d ago

Yeah, tracking errors add up in the stack too.

uma_webb2810d ago

Tell me about it. My last project looked great on paper but the final layout was a solid foot off. Guess that's why they call them estimates.

jessica_miller10d ago

Reminds me of that old saying about measure twice, cut once.