Pro astronomers discover stacking?

[legion48]

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/070905_tw_lucky_camera.html

Quote: To create a ground-based system that could beat noise and fit a budget, Mackay and his team used power in numbers. Their new imaging system takes pictures at 20 frames per second, chooses the best of tens of thousands of images, merges them together and eliminates random noise. End quote.

Isn't that what we've been doing?

[Vega]

To be fair.. it's implementing what us amateurs do with our cheapo 640x480 res webcams (which anyone can do) only they have designed a filthy expensive camera ($100k) that can do it NASA style

Think of it as webcam stacking on Steroids, Pro-Plus and Speed

Vega

[Astroman]

Hmmmm. Stacking is fine for "pretty pictures", but makes science tricky, imho. Calibration between stacked frames is crucial to getting valuable science. Any variations in pixel values between stacked frames, including noise, bias and flat subtraction, would tend to skew results. I hope they have large error bars. 8) We've been stacking go/no go images for years in GRB searches, but we leave the hi-res spectra to the big boys-Keck, Gemini, VLT etc. I'm not sure those observatories can stack images gracefully, if you will.

Still pondering...