Stacking

[Jay1989]

I've seen a fair few people mention this, just wondering what it is and how you do it? Haha

Also, subs, what is that? Lol

Sorry, probably stupid questions but this is my first DSLR so I really have no idea

[carastro]

Subs are the sub exposures you take i.e. lots of exposures for say 5 mins which you stack together.  

Ideally you should also take what are called calibration subs (darks, flats and bias) as these filter out undesirable elements of your images, but as you have just started you probably haven't done these.  Darks help to remove noise and hot pixels, flats remove optical defects and bias remove read noise etc.  

The idea is that you take a number of exposures (subs) of a given length and stack them together to produce a cleaner and less noisy image.  

This can be achieved using specially designed software of which there are several, but probably the easiest to use for a beginner (and it's free) is Deep Sky Stacker.  Download this and put all your light frames (subs) into where it says open picture files.  Click check all - then click Register checked pictures, then click OK and it will stack them for you.  Obviously this is the most basic way of doing it, as there are a number of options, but this will get you started.

If by any chance you did take darks flats and bias just enter them in the relevant places.

Carole 

[D4N]

Note that if you are stacking planetary, lunar or solar images you will be better off with AS!2 or registax.

DSS is designed for deep space images where it can use the stars to align them, it will fail to align images that don't have any stars in them.

http://www.autostakkert.com

http://www.astronomie.be/registax/

Sometimes PIPP can be handy to pre process the files if AS!2 or registax is struggling with them.

https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/

Make sure you are shooting in RAW mode, the JPEG compression will ruin your images before they even leave the camera.

/Dan

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[Jay1989]

Thanks guys now it makes more sense, will download the software now

Dan, yeah I always shoot in RAW, pics turn out a lot better

Can you use Lightroom for stacking? I have that now

[D4N]

It is possible to use Lightroom to stack manually if you install a layers plugin but I wouldn't recommend it.

/Dan

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[Jay1989]

Ah maybe I won't use Lightroom for it then lol

[Steve Ward]