A guy at the Tucson star party told me my stacking was too aggressive and it was washing out detail. He was right.

3 comments

3 Comments

Yeah, that's a super common trap to fall into. I've done it myself, stacking like 90% of my frames trying to get that smooth look and just ending up with a flat, mushy image. It's like you're trying so hard to kill the noise that you kill the actual data in the nebula or galaxy arms too. Dialing it back to maybe 60 or 70% of your best subs can keep way more of the real texture and depth.

marymorgan1mo ago

Oh man, the "flat, mushy image" is so real. I've definitely murdered a few galaxies in my quest for smoothness, like I was trying to give them a spa day but accidentally erased their faces. It's the worst when you realize you spent all that imaging time just to make a cosmic blob. Now I'm scared to even go past 50% rejection!

seth_wells4916d ago

That cosmic blob feeling @marymorgan mentioned is the worst. Something that helped me was checking the stack's histogram after each rejection pass. If the black point starts creeping up, you're cutting data, not just noise. Gotta leave some grain to show the actual structure.