That old-timer at Kitt Peak told me to stack 30 frames minimum for nebula shots, I thought he was crazy.

I did 15 frames on the Orion Nebula last week and got nothing but noise, tried his method with 32 frames and the detail popped out like magic. Anyone else ignore advice from the greybeards and regret it?

2 comments

2 Comments

river32012d ago

Old guys at observatories usually know what they're talking about" - that's the truth. My buddy Dan thought he knew better than the retired engineer who runs the local club's loaner scope program. Told him you needed at least 40 darks to calibrate his DSLR shots. Dan did 15 darks one night and his Andromeda stack came out with this weird gradient and hot pixels all over the place. He tried 45 darks the next session and the correction was basically perfect. He still brings it up when we're out observing, grumbling that the old guy was right and he wasted a perfectly good weekend. The guy's been doing astrophotography since the 1970s. He probably forgot more than most of us will ever learn.

elliot_johnson3112d ago

Yeah, I learned that lesson on the Andromeda Galaxy. Stacked 20 frames once and it looked like a blurry smudge, pushed it to 50 and suddenly saw the dust lanes clear as day. Old guys at observatories usually know what they're talking about, they've been doing this since before autoguiding was a thing.