Stitching vs. stacking for deep sky photos - which one do you use?

I got into astrophotography about a year back and I keep going back and forth between these two ways of processing my images. Stitching is where you take a bunch of narrow field shots and combine them into a wide panorama, while stacking is where you layer dozens of the same target to clean up noise and bring out detail. Last month I tried stitching a mosaic of the Andromeda galaxy with about 15 frames from my DSLR and a 200mm lens, and it took me nearly 4 hours just to get the seams right in the software. But stacking the same target gave me way more detail in the core and arms after only 30 exposures, even though the field of view was smaller. I'm leaning toward stacking now for single targets but stitching feels better for big sweeping shots. Which approach do you guys lean on and do you have any tips for blending the two without wrecking the data?

2 comments

2 Comments

anderson.jason1mo ago

Started out all for stitching but your Andromeda example just made me rethink my whole workflow.

riley_coleman81mo ago

That 15 frame mosaic of Andromeda sounds brutal... I did a 12 frame one of Orion last winter and spent three hours just fixing the gradient mismatches between panels. I'd say keep stacking for single targets but try a program like Microsoft ICE for the mosaics, it handles the seams way faster than Photoshop does.