Stumbled on a trick for stacking astrophotos at 3am...

I was up late last week processing shots of the Orion Nebula from my backyard in Tucson, and this guy on Discord named Mike told me to try stacking with sigma clipping instead of average. He said it would kill the satellite trails that were ruining my final image, and honestly it worked way better than I expected after just two tries. Has anyone else found a weird processing tweak that fixed a nagging problem in their photos?

3 comments

3 Comments

blake7921mo ago

Yeah sigma clipping is legit for satellite trails. I used it on a stack of Andromeda shots last fall and it saved me from having to toss a dozen frames. The trick I found was to set the clipping level a bit higher than default like 3.5 or 4 sigma instead of the usual 3 to keep from softening the stars too much. Also try doing a quick pass with manual rejection masks in DeepSkyStacker if you have stubborn trails that won't go away with just sigma clipping alone.

jana8811mo ago

Pretty sure DSS uses 2 sigma by default actually.

nelson.vera1mo ago

Tucson here too, Mike's advice on sigma clipping saved my Orion shots last month.