Topping up data

[Anthony1979]

I was out with my 130pds last night for the first time in months... So i got about 80 30 sec of andromeda... Could i go out again tonight and add tonights data to last nights

[Freddie]

Yes you can.  How you then stack the two sets will depend on the stacking software you are using.

[Anthony1979]

I use dss... Can i just add them all to last nights and stack them all as 1 file

[discardedastro]

1 hour ago, Anthony1979 said:

I use dss... Can i just add them all to last nights and stack them all as 1 file

If your calibration data doesn't change, yes.

Generally I keep my "calibrated but unprocessed" raw data from each night for this reason - get to the point where you've applied darks, flats, etc, and store the raw images. Not sure exactly how you'd achieve this with DSS, but I think there's an option to export calibrated data rather than going straight to stacking.

The advantage of this approach is you can then register all your images without having to recalibrate each set.

I do this consistently now and have combined data from 4-5 nights of data capture in the past - it makes combining later data super straightforward as (in PixInsight at least) you just process your latest night's data till you're ready to register, and then throw everything in and process it all as one big dataset without treating each night differently (I will usually do this and then do filtering of bad frames, though will always discard clearly broken frames in advance).