First deep sky stack actually came out decent

I spent about 4 hours in my backyard in Bakersfield on Tuesday shooting the Orion Nebula with just my DSLR and a cheap tripod, no tracker. Stacked about 200 frames in DeepSkyStacker and was shocked to actually see some of the dust clouds pop through the light pollution. Any tips for getting more detail out of the core area without blowing out the rest of the image?

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sean1192mo ago

Man that "actually came out decent" hit me right in the feels because I know that feeling all too well lol. I did pretty much the same setup with my old Canon T3i in my driveway in the suburbs and it took like five tries before I got anything that didn't look like a blurry smudge. For the core thing you're asking about, I found that taking a few really short exposures like 10 seconds each just for the core and then blending them in with the longer ones in Photoshop helped me keep that detail without washing everything else out. It's a bit of a pain to stack two separate sets of frames but it made a huge difference for me when I finally got it right. Congrats on a solid first stack though seriously that's not easy to pull off with just a tripod.

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brian_kelly912mo ago

Five tries? Rookie numbers, I think I hit double digits before my first one wasn't a blurry smudge.

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