Tried stacking photos of the Milky Way from my backyard in Phoenix last week

I live in Phoenix, so light pollution is a nightmare for astrophotography. Last week I decided to finally try stacking some shots of the Milky Way using free software I found online. I took about 40 raw images with my old DSLR on a cheap tripod, each one at 15 seconds exposure. The stacking process took forever on my laptop, like over an hour just running the alignment. The final result actually turned out way better than I expected, with some faint dust lanes showing up. But I'm getting a lot of weird color halos around bright stars in the final image. Has anyone else dealt with this kind of color fringing after stacking, and is there a trick to fix it in the software settings?

2 comments

2 Comments

dylan_bell5d ago

I used to think color halos were just a lens problem you had to live with, but after messing with DeepSkyStacker settings a few months ago I realized it's often a stacking alignment issue. Try turning off the "detect and remove hot pixels" or lowering the star detection threshold in the settings. That cut down my fringing by like 80% on a similar Phoenix shoot.

troyreed5d ago

Got a buddy down in Tucson who had the exact same issue last summer. He spent like three nights shooting the Milky Way from his backyard and then another whole evening stacking everything in DeepSkyStacker. The final image came out with these ugly purple and green halos around all the bright stars. He was about to scrap the whole thing until he found a forum post suggesting he lower the star detection threshold from like 10% down to 2%. He re-ran the stack and the halos basically disappeared, just turned into normal tiny stars. He said it took about 10 extra minutes of processing but the result was night and day.