milkyway-stacking

14 Aug 2018

Here’s something fun: around 10 years ago, my family went to Cape San Blas, FL for a week. I was just getting into photography – I had a Canon 20D, a wide angle lens, and no idea what I was doing. But the views of the Milky Way from the beach were spectacular. I tried taking some long exposures, but between the noise of my relatively old crop sensor and the heat, the results were riddled with noise and hot pixels. I gave up and never posted any of the shots I got that night.

Skip forward ten years, and here I am playing with astrophotography and learning all about image stacking. It occurred to me I might be able to salvage the original data. I had the 10 original raw images and I gave it a whirl. I was stunned by the results!

On the left is an example of an uncorrected frame I got that night. On the right, the result of stacking & cleaning up. Modern software is pretty cool.

• Camera: Canon EOS 20D
• Lens: EF-S 10-22mm (shot at 10mm)
• ISO: 3200
• Aperture: f/3.5
• Shutter Speed: 30”
• Total Exposures: 10
• Software: DeepSkyStacker for stacking, darktable for levels correction & post-processing.