Hot take: stacking multiple short exposures beats one long exposure for deep sky photos

I've been into astrophotography for about 6 months now, and everyone always told me to go for those 5-minute single exposures to get faint nebula detail. But my mount is a cheap used one I got for $150 on Facebook Marketplace, and it can't track worth a damn past 90 seconds without star trailing. So I tried something different last week - I took 200 thirty-second exposures of the Orion Nebula instead of 20 two-minute ones. Stacked them in DeepSkyStacker and the result was way cleaner with less noise and no trailed stars. The downside is way more processing time and file management, but for someone with beginner gear it actually works better. Has anyone else found that shorter subs stacked higher work better than fighting with imperfect tracking for longer ones?

3 comments

3 Comments

henryp4027d ago

200 thirty-second exposures? Man, that's a lot of files to sort through. I can barely handle stacking 50 frames without my computer slowing down to a crawl. Your cheap mount must be pulling overtime to not drift those 30 second subs. What kind of sky quality are you working with that you can pull that level of detail from so many short frames? Sounds like a total headache for processing but I bet the results look killer if your tracking is that sloppy.

mason_lopez27d ago

Chill out dude it's just stacking not rocket science.

jakejones27d ago

Batch convert them to dng first, makes stacking 200 subs way smoother. @mason_lopez knows the trick.