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Originally Posted by Bassnut
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This thread is about the merits (or not) of software binning in order to decrease noise by means of averaging (not summing).
It's mostly useless for normal photography - there's a good few articles about it on the web. Averaging may look better in normal photography, but what you're really doing is applying a low pass filter. Any high frequency information is lost in the image (along with the noise - random noise is also high frequency).
However, astrophotography is a bit of a different beast, in that high frequency information may not be present, due to your CCD's resolving power being larger than seeing conditions require. You can tell if that's the case if your image looks 'soft' and is devoid of high frequency signal (except for noise). An image like this is a good candidate for binning by averaging.
It can be a boon for astrophotography under the right conditions, but don't expect it to do anything for the signal-to-noise ratio in your holiday snaps...
