Hot take: Most people stack their astrophotography images wrong

I was at a meetup in Tucson last month and watched a guy load 200 frames into a stacker without any calibration frames. He just hit go and called it good. I do deep sky shots from my backyard here in Phoenix and I've spent enough nights freezing to know those dark frames matter. Without them you get hot pixels and weird gradients that ruin the final picture. I usually shoot 30 darks and 30 flats per session and it makes a night and day difference. Has anyone else noticed folks skipping this step and then wondering why their nebula looks fuzzy?

2 comments

2 Comments

ben4866d ago

Huh, that's a pretty bold claim. I mean, yeah, dark frames help, but are we really gonna act like stacking software hasn't gotten way better in the last few years? People have been getting solid results with just lights and flats for a while now, especially with newer cameras that have way less noise. I think saying it's "wrong" is kind of overstating things. If someone's getting clean stacks with just sigma clipping and their setup, then who cares? The results speak for themselves, not some rigid rulebook from 2010. It's just not that deep most of the time.

jones.blake6d ago

Hold up though, most stacking software actually does a decent job rejecting hot pixels on its own if you feed it enough frames. Dark frames are still a good idea for removing amp glow and fixed pattern noise, but I've gotten clean results from 100+ lights with no darks just using sigma clipping in DSS. Flats are the real hero for fixing gradients and vignetting, way more important than darks for most modern cameras.