Subscribe
RSS
Recent Posts
Revisiting the Triangulum Galaxy
Deep Sky Astrophotography with your Camera and Lens Part 2
Deep Sky Astrophotography with your Camera and Lens Part 1
A Golden Horeshoe Collaboration: M31 Andromeda Galaxy
IC 1805: Gnarly Creatures In Space
The Power of Image Stacking
Comet Processing for Non Trailing Stars and Comet
Focal Reducer test: Celestron SCT f6.3 and 80mm refractor (2008 article)
Adventures in Astrophotography: How I got started (2008 article)
Welcome to Weather and Sky Photography's Blog
Archive
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
|
The Power of Image StackingIn astrophotography we are often times trying to extract detail and colours of very faint deep sky objects from what looks like nothing but a brownish or yellowish night sky. As we try to do this on a single frame we are often greeted with a great amount of noise and little to no hint of the object that we are trying to capture. Since noise is random, if we stack the images we can then average it out to a smoother, cleaner image. Below is an example of how image stacking made a huge improvement in the quality of my M51 Whirlpool Galaxy image.
Here is the image with 38 stacked frames. You can see much more colour and detail in the galaxy now.
The relationship between signal and noise boils down to the inverse square law.
There are many free stacking programs available. The one that I used for these shots is Deep Sky Stacker... http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html.
My latest M51 (2010) http://www.weatherandsky.com/p1015296644/h5912ad60#h5912ad60
Happy Stacking!! Comments
No comments posted.
Loading...
|