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Warning: your star tracker is smoothing out the dim stuff and you won't see it until you stack
I shot the same stretch of sky over my backyard in Boise three times last month and kept wondering why my faint nebulosity looked like a flat gray smear, then I compared raw singles to my stacked output and saw the tracker was correcting in tiny jumps that blurred the dim gas. Nobody mentions this, but if you're chasing faint detail, check your subs at 200% before you trust a 40 frame stack. Has anyone else caught their mount hiding a tracking slip that the stack covered up?
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robinwalker1d ago
Man, this is a good catch and it goes further than most people think: those tiny corrections don't just blur the dim stuff, they add up across 40 frames into square little stars and soft corners that you'll blame on your optics. Check your subs at 200% and run a quick blink through them before stacking so you catch the jumps while you can still toss the bad ones. A stack hides a lot of sins, and the dim gas is usually the first thing to pay for it.
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