Stacked my telescope shots for years the wrong way until a guy at a star party in Flagstaff showed me the difference

I used to just stack all my raw frames together in DeepSkyStacker with default settings and call it a day. Thought my images looked decent enough for an amateur setup. Then last October I met this older gentleman at a star party near Flagstaff who asked to see my workflow. He pulled up his laptop and showed me his process using calibration frames - darks, flats, and bias frames - something I had skipped entirely because I thought it was too much extra work. The difference was night and day. His Andromeda galaxy shot had no gradient, no dust motes, and the stars were pin sharp. I spent the next week re-shooting my data with proper calibration frames and the result was about 40% cleaner than anything I had made before. Has anyone else had that moment where they realized they were skipping a critical step for years? What technique did you finally adopt that made the biggest jump in quality?

2 comments

2 Comments

gavinb9717d ago

That Flagstaff guy sounds like he probably uses PixInsight too, heh.

jennifer_jenkins17d ago

Gavin, you got me - I plead guilty to the PixInsight thing.