Video - Why we Stack - A visual guide

[turbo_pascale (Rob)]

I just published a video on "Why do we Stack", which might give some beginners a good understanding of the fundamentals of image stacking. I hope someone finds it useful.

The images were generated in DeepSkyStacker at each stage in order to show the incremental improvements from each stage.

Image Stacking is at the core of making those nice, smooth images everyone loves. But why do we do it exactly?
Following all the steps like a mindless robot works, but understanding what's happening behind the scenes, step by step, will cement it in your mind, and get you closer to being able to fix things when they go wrong.

This is a visual guide to how to go from a raw image, through calibration with Bias, Dark and Flat frames, and then explain the reasoning behind stacking more and more exposures (with visual examples ranging from 5 minutes, 10, 20, 40 and 80 minutes)

https://youtu.be/2UPnH9hiVpw

[RyanJones]

Hi Rob,

Thank you for posting this. I’m a great believer of understanding why you’re doing something rather than just doing it because you’ve been told to or because others do it. I feel that once you understand why, it’s a lot easier to apply it to your own work and make changes or adaptations to suit your individual work. I hope this helps other imagers out too. For those imaging in highly light polluted skies, I can attest to the compound difference it makes to have more data and better calibrated data also. Thanks again