Is stacking worth it?

[osbourne one-nil]

A few weeks ago, I took a 5min exposure of Orion from the back garden and was absolutely delighted with the result. Last night, my son and I ventured out the fell and took five 1min exposures of Orion with the aim of staking them when we got back.

Both times we used ISO400 with a 50mm prime lens on a Canon 1100D with an Astrotrac.

To me, the stacked image looks no different at all to the individual 1min exposure, and obviously infinitely less interesting than my 5min exposure.

I guess if noise isn't an issue (or your personal tolerance to noise is ok) then perhaps staking isn't required?

I suppose there's also a chance I did it wrong?!

[Freddie]

What did you use to stack the images? Have you adjusted levels and curves since stacking?

[JB80]

I agree with Freddie, after the stacking run it through Gimp or PS or whichever editing software you like and play with the curves.

I hope you don't mind but I had a little tweak to see what I could do, I am nowhere near good at this though so don't laugh but it shows that there is more data in the pictures to bring out.

Your pic is the one on the left.

Basically I followed John's guide for basic widefield here...

http://stargazerslounge.com/imaging-tips-tricks-techniques/73737-basic-widefield-camera-tripod.html

Someone who knows what they are doing more than I will probably be able to do better though.

[ollypenrice]

You undid the beneit of stacking by dropping to 1 minute subs. If you'd stacked 5x5 min subs you'd have had a far better result. Stacking has an absolutely incredible effect on signal to noise but does require the Levels and Curves routine afterwards. Have a look at RobH's website for a turorial. (Google Middle Hill Observatory Rob Hodgkinson.)

Olly

[Ouroboros]

I agree with what's been said.

Osbourne - I too was so disappointed when I first stacked. Then I realised the information is there, it "just" has to be extracted and optimised in photoshop or similar program.

Mind you, if I had skies as dark as you appear to, and good tracking, I'd shoot a few 5 minute exposures, stack 'em, and then optimise the result. Should look super.

Edit: There's a lot of free info on the internet about how to optimise astrophotographs. Google for Jerry Lodriguss - he's got some free info and he sells a web book called Photoshop for Astrophotographers. If you prefer a physical book, Digital SLR Astrophotograhy by Michael Covington is very helpful too. I'm sure there are many other sources too.

[osbourne one-nil]

Thanks everyone - very encouraging. And Pibbles; I don't mind in the slightest at anyone having a turn on the photos...what you've done looks great, so I'm convinced!

I must admit, I didn't spend any time adjusting anything, and simply stacked the images in Photoshop reducing the new image to 50% opacity, etc etc. I did think there'd be a lot more to it, but also expected to see some benefit even with doing nothing.

I am lucky to have very dark skies (when I leave the village, where the first photo was taken anyway) so I fully intend to make the most of it and will follow up those tips asap.

[JimStan]

If you stacked the images in PhotoShop, you really did it the hard way !

Take your individual images, and apply them to a program such as Deep Sky Stacker . Then take the result of THAT stack, and apply curves, levels, etc. in Photoshop. I think you will be utterly amazed at the results you can obtain.

I do notice a bit of light pollution sneaking into the lower part of your image. You can eliminate that with a trick using layers and subtracting a gaussian blurred layer to the background. But that is a topic for another entirely new thread. ( In fact, the technique is discussed in one of the tutorials found here on this forum )

Jim S.