> STACKED IMAGE VS. LONG EXPOSURE
Witch is better. Stack or long exposure? It depends…
Long exposure will reveal more details but stack will improve the contrast and faint details by decreasing the background noise. It also decrees the atmosphere turbulence winch as the noise has a random distribution (of course this is more obvious for short exposures)
Long exposure is also hard to shoot as you need guider setup. Also at my place there is a lot of wind, so this is a hard thing to do. Best is to estimate the limited exposure of the sky background and do a stack with that exposure. To estimate it look at the histogram the peak should be 1/3 away from the left.
Below is a comparison of Galaxy M33 between long shot – 80 seconds at ISO 51200 and stack of 20 frames by 30 sec. at ISO 12800.
The single frame is easier to process but stacked frame give us more signal to noise ratio. We can always add more and more signal by taking extra frames. You can use higher ISO and reduce the noise that way.
SKY is the limit :)
One shot:
Stack:
While cleaning up my PC I found sequences of shots of Virgo galaxy cluster taken during springs of the last 2 years. Those were attempts to shot this object, but I was not satisfied with the result and left them.
I recently bought a pocket spectroscope for laboratory use. You can find it at Ali for 5$. It is with glass prism and well build. So I did some test to use with a telescope but did not
http://www.deepskywatch.com/deep-sky-hunter-atlas.html This is an amazing resource. Detailed atlas of all the sky with NGC and IC objects.
Reading a new product that claims to be 100x time more powerful then conventional telescope, I realise that this is just an astrograph with a digital camera that is doing stacked images and show them trought eyepiece or App.
I am so impressed with the K5 ability to quickly gather signal from nebulas (Quantum efficiency) and galaxies, so I decide to take one more K5 and to remove the IR-cut Filter of the old one.
