I tried stacking 50 photos of the Orion Nebula and it looked worse than my single shot

Everyone says you need to stack dozens of images to get a clean deep sky photo. So last month, I spent a whole night with my basic DSLR and tripod taking 50 one-minute exposures of M42. When I stacked them in DeepSkyStacker, the result was a noisy, soft mess with weird color bands. My best single frame from that night was actually sharper and had better contrast. I think maybe my tracking wasn't perfect, so stacking just added all the tiny errors together. Has anyone else had stacking make things worse, and what did you do to fix it?

3 comments

3 Comments

murray.betty1mo ago

Ugh, I read that bad alignment can totally wreck a stack. Maybe check your star detection settings in DSS?

sams251mo ago

Did you try lowering the star detection threshold? That fixed my blurry stack last week.

nancyd852d ago

Did you try manually aligning a couple frames in DSS first (like @sams25 said about lowering the threshold)? That's what finally got my stack sharp after fighting with it for hours.