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Serious question, did that guy at the star party give me bad advice about stacking?
At a star party outside Tucson last spring, a guy with a 12 inch Dob told me to just stack 500 short subs of Andromeda instead of bothering with long exposures, and my first try came out looking like gray mush. I switched to 40 subs at 3 minutes each with the same camera and the dust lanes finally showed up, so now I'm wondering if he was just messing with the new guy. So which side are you on, tons of short frames or fewer long ones, and does it actually depend on how bad your tracking is?
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anna_fox78d ago
Did he also tell you to throw away your dark frames and just hope for the best? Short subs are great if your mount is drunk, but 500 of them on Andromeda is like mowing your lawn with nail clippers. You still need enough exposure per frame to get above the read noise, otherwise you're just stacking 500 piles of gray mush and calling it data. Your 3 minute subs worked because the camera actually had signal to work with. The real answer is it depends on your tracking, but anyone saying "always 500 short ones" is probably the same guy who swears by a $30 tripod.
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