PSA: I stacked 50 shots of the Orion Nebula and it looked worse than a single frame

I spent a whole night last week capturing 50 two-minute exposures of M42 with my ZWO ASI533MC. Everyone says more data is always better, so I stacked them all in DeepSkyStacker. The final image was a noisy, soft mess with weird color blotches. I think my tracking was off just enough on some shots that stacking actually blurred the details. Has anyone else found that sometimes less is more with stacking?

3 comments

3 Comments

wyatt8512mo ago

My buddy Jim had the same thing happen with his Andromeda shots last fall. He threw out 30 frames because his polar alignment drifted a tiny bit over the night. The stacking software tried to blend them all and just made a fuzzy soup. He went back and only used the 15 sharpest frames, and the final image was way cleaner. It taught him that bad data really can hurt a good stack.

elizabeth2202mo ago

Same with my moon shots... blurry ones just ruin the stack.

willow_martin2mo ago

Oh man, my friend Sarah had that exact thing happen with her Horsehead Nebula data.