One comment about my star stacking ruined my workflow

I've been stacking astro photos the same way for like two years now. Just loading everything into DeepSkyStacker and letting it do its default thing. Seemed fine to me and my nebula shots looked okay. Then last month a guy on this very forum looked at one of my M31 shots and said "your stars look bloated, you should try drizzle integration." I honestly didn't even know what that meant. He explained it adds more data from the Bayer pattern and reduces that star roundness issue. I went back to the same 47 light frames from that night and reprocessed them using drizzle at 2x. The difference was huge. The background was way smoother and the core detail in Andromeda actually popped without looking mushy. It took my laptop 6 hours to crunch it instead of 45 minutes but now I can't go back. Has anyone else had that thing where one piece of feedback forces you to redo your whole workflow?

3 comments

3 Comments

sarahpatel1mo ago

47 subs is a pretty small sample to do a whole 2x drizzle on tbh. Makes me wonder if you just had bad seeing that night and it'd have looked better with a simple Bayer drizzle instead. 6 hours for that seems like overkill for a single target.

sean_walker451mo ago

Yeah, honestly I've been there. 47 subs is really pushing it for 2x drizzle. I've found that unless you're at like 100+ subs, the drizzle just amplifies the noise more than the detail. Your mileage may vary but I usually stick to regular drizzle or even just a simple sharpening pass when I'm that low on frames. 6 hours on one target feels like a lot of processing time for something that might not really benefit.

jesse_craig261mo ago

Wait, Bayer drizzle is a real thing? Thought that was just a typo.