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Why I quit stacking hundreds of subs on the Ring Nebula and started shooting 20 minute singles instead
I used to be the guy who would sit in my backyard in Flagstaff for 6 hours a night running 300 two minute subs on M57 because every post I read said more frames equals less noise, period. Then a buddy from my local club loaned me his old mount and I tried something stupid, just 8 single 20 minute shots on the same target, and when I stacked both sets the long ones blew the short ones out of the water on faint detail. Here is what tipped me off, I pulled up my 300 sub stack and zoomed into the outer shell and it was basically smooth mush, while the 8 shot version showed structure I had never seen in my own pictures. Turns out I was fighting read noise on a camera that does not really have much of it, and every one of those 2 minute frames was throwing away signal I could have kept. I spent almost a year and probably 60 clear nights doing it the hard way because a forum post from 2014 told me to. I am not saying long subs work for everyone, if your mount drifts or you live under bad sky it will wreck you, but for my setup the difference was not even close. Has anyone else here switched to fewer but way longer exposures and gotten a better result, or am I just lucky with my polar alignment?
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umabailey12d ago
Could you push it even further with 30 min subs?
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