I was stacking my deep sky images wrong for a whole year and didn't know it

Last month, I was looking at my stacked shot of the Orion Nebula and it just looked muddy and soft. A friend asked if I was using darks and bias frames along with my lights, and I admitted I'd only been stacking the light frames. He told me to shoot 30 dark frames right then with the lens cap on. Adding those to my stack was like wiping a dirty window clean. The noise just vanished. Has anyone else skipped calibration frames and been shocked by the difference?

3 comments

3 Comments

daniel47418d ago

Remember my buddy bragging about his new camera for deep space stuff. He showed me this grainy mess he called the Andromeda Galaxy. Honestly told him his pictures looked like static on an old TV. He finally tried dark frames last week and the change was honestly insane, like he got a whole new telescope.

veraj5318d ago

Wait, dark frames made that big a difference for a galaxy shot? I thought they mostly help with thermal noise from long exposures, like for nebulas. Andromeda is so bright you usually don't need super long subs. Maybe his real issue was bad flats or light pollution.

shanem3718d ago

Yeah, dark frames can clean up amp glow and hot pixels even on bright targets. I've seen them turn a blotchy background into smooth data on a 30 second sub. Bad flats would show dust donuts, not that overall grain.