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TIL that stacking 40 lights in a free program beat my single 4 minute exposure
I shoot from my backyard in Boise and the sky glow was washing out everything past 30 seconds. Instead of buying a tracker, I took 40 shots at 20 seconds each with my old Canon T3i and stacked them in DeepSkyStacker. The noise just fell apart and I could actually pull out the Orion Nebula's color. Does anyone here shoot shorter subs on purpose, or am I losing faint detail by not going longer?
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scott.shane19d ago
40 subs at 20 seconds is basically where I landed too, shooting M42 from my driveway in Nampa with a T3i. The noise drop is real, going from one 4 minute frame to 40 stacked is like night and day. Long subs only win when your read noise is the bottleneck, but in a light polluted backyard the sky glow is way worse than your camera's read noise, so short subs actually pull ahead. I ran 30 second subs on the Rosette last winter and stacked 60 of them, the faint stuff came through fine once I ditched the frames with satellites and planes. The one trade off is your hard drive fills up fast and stacking takes longer, but that beats dropping cash on a tracker. Keep your subs where the histogram peak sits around a quarter to a third off the left edge and you're good.
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