A cloudy night in Boulder taught me a better way to stack astrophotos

I've been messing with stacking astrophotography for like 6 months and always ended up with weird gradients or blurry stars. I thought you had to use the fancy settings in DSS or PixInsight to get good results. Then last week I went out to a spot near Boulder and shot 400 frames of the Andromeda galaxy on my old Canon. A guy at the trailhead told me to just try the 'average' stacking mode instead of 'median' or 'sigma clipping'. I was skeptical but figured why not. It cut out all the satellite trails and plane streaks in one pass without me having to tweak anything. Now I look like I actually know what I'm doing. Has anyone else had luck with a simple setting change that made stacking way easier?

4 comments

4 Comments

leewood4d ago

Always did the median thing because everyone said it was better. Tried average once on a whim and yeah, it cleaned up all my weird noise without me having to mess with sliders for an hour.

charlies373d ago

Is it really that big of a deal either way?

harperp243d ago

See for me it was the opposite, average just made everything muddy and I couldn't dial in what I wanted. Maybe it just depends on the kind of audio you're working with.

ramirez.vera3d ago

OH for real, I used to be in the "whatever works" camp too until I actually tested both. But @leewood is right, switching to average cleaned up my background hiss way faster than median ever did. Now I'm definitely converted, that one little change saved me so much tweaking time.