Spent 3 hours trying to stack an astrophotography shot of Andromeda last night

I got home from a dark sky site near my town around 2am with about 80 frames of M31. Thought I could just toss them into DeepSkyStacker and be done in 20 minutes. Nope. Kept getting weird alignment errors because I forgot to calibrate my darks and flats first. Took me a full 3 hours to realize I had to reregister my reference frame manually. Has anyone else wasted a whole night on stacking software quirks?

3 comments

3 Comments

owens.anthony1d agoMost Upvoted

Did your friend ever figure out the issue? My buddy Steve spent four hours one night banging his head against DSS, only to realize his calibration frames were all taken at ISO 800 while his lights were at ISO 1600 (rookie mistake, I guess). He had to reshoot everything the next weekend, which sucked because the moon was already getting in the way by then.

leo_black761d ago

82 frames of M31, that's a solid night's work. I had a similar DSS meltdown last month where it kept saying "no stars found" on every frame. Turns out I had bumped the focus ring just a tiny bit. @owens.anthony, your buddy's ISO mix up is a classic. What fixed it for me was ditching DSS's auto settings and going manual. I set the star detection threshold way lower, like to 2% instead of default 10%, and it started picking up stars again. Also, I stopped doing calibration frames separately and just used DSS's built in batch calibration tool now. It's clunky but it saves you from forgetting to match ISO. Took me two tries but once I got it working, the stack came out clean in under 15 minutes. That manual reference frame trick you mentioned is key.

lily_torres311d ago

Did the star detection threshold fix also mess with your alignment points? I ask because when I dropped mine down to 2% on a stack of the Veil Nebula, DSS started flagging hot pixels and satellite trails as stars. Took me an extra hour to weed those out in the alignment settings by limiting the star shape to a roundness of 0.8 or higher. For Andromeda, that trick actually works better since the core is so bright it can fool the software into thinking it's one giant star. That manual reference frame thing saved me too, but I had to go in and mark the same star in about half my frames before it would finally lock onto the rest.