tyler6•2mo ago

The one comment about stacking subs that got me

I was scrolling through a thread the other day and someone said you should only stack your best 50% of subs, not all of them. I've been dumping every single 30-second frame into DeepSkyStacker for like 8 months now. That includes the ones where Jupiter photobombed my Andromeda shot and the ones where a plane flew through the frame. I reprocessed a cluster image from March with that 50% rule and actually saw detail in the outer stars for the first time. Has anyone else been wasting time throwing bad data in the pile without checking first?

3 comments

3 Comments

morgan_ramirez2mo ago

I heard somewhere that some astrophotographers only stack the sharpest frames, like 30-40% of what they shoot. Makes you wonder how much time we waste polishing garbage data instead of just being more careful up front.

kelly_nelson952mo ago

Is it really that deep though? I mean yeah you want good data but tossing 60-70% of your frames seems wasteful. Most nights the seeing is just ok so you take what you can get and stack it all out.

johnson.daniel1mo ago

Have you ever actually tested what happens when you just toss the worst frames? @kelly_nelson95 I used to stack everything too, thinking I was being efficient or whatever. But one night I got super frustrated with a bunch of blurry subs from bad seeing and just dumped all of them except the sharpest 40%. The final image looked way cleaner than anything Id gotten before from the same data. It felt like a waste at first but honestly those blurry frames just add noise and mess up the detail. Now I always grade my subs and only keep the ones that hit a certain sharpness level. Its more work upfront but it saves so much time later when you arent trying to fix garbage in processing.