Hi All,
I tried stacking the sky in my older wide-field sequences with Deep Sky Stacker and I thought the result is worth sharing.
I took 15 images from a time-lapse sequence of 15-second exposures (Flinders, October 2009), dropped them into DSS and played with the settings until I was satisfied with the result. There is much less noise as you would expect and I was able to recover considerably more detail. As a bonus, the stars are quite round because of shorter exposure time.
The final image is a blend of the stacked sky and stacked ground in Photoshop.
To me, the Emu looks like it is drinking from the ocean (upside down or not...). The field is about 100 degrees wide (Nikon D700 with 14-24mm lens).
I attached the small version of the image I processed in DSS and links to larger versions are below.
5 Mega-pixel DSS processed image showing the sky detail:
http://www.terrastro.com/iis/emu-dss.jpg
And larger old single sky shot:
http://www.terrastro.com/iis/emu-original.jpg
Cheers,
Alex