Question: Is hand picking subs necessary?

[Doodles23]

I have wondered for the longest time whether the planetary pros hand pick their frames. I routinely capture 1000 frames. My software (Astro IIDC) analyzes the frames and sorts them into an ordered pile with the highest quality on top. At this point I will select a subset of the top 350 highest quality frames and process those. If I flip through the 350 frames and examine them I notice that some are really sub-par and I wonder how they even got into the high graded group. So I can delete them in a tedious process or I can just skip the manual deletions and proceed to stacking. What I have noticed is that it doesn't seem to make a great deal of difference whether I manually edit further or not in the final processed image.

So my question to our planetary pros is: Do you tediously delete frames out of your software selected group or not???? Or do you simply accept the set of software selected frames as they are?:confused2:

[iceman]

Hi Dave
At one time in the past I tried it a few times, but these days I wouldn't have the patience or time for that these days.

I'd usually let ninox or registax pick the best frames. No doubt it sometimes gets it wrong, but I guess it's a time vs reward thing.

I know Anthony uses ninox solely to rank his frames, and doesn't let Registax do any ranking/sorting of frames. He just uses registax to stack the best X frames that ninox picked out.

[Octane]

I guess it also depends on the stacking algorithm. I'm not a planetary person, but, with deep space objects, if I have a frame or two with dodgy stars, I leave them in. The sigma-kappa combine method will ignore anomalous pixels.

H

[Doodles23]

Thanks Mike. One of the things you immediately notice when inspecting the chosen frames is that many of the frames are so bad you wonder how they survived the selection process.