Found a trick for stacking star photos on a cloudy night at Cherry Springs

I was up at Cherry Springs State Park last month trying to get the Milky Way and the clouds just wouldn't quit. Three nights in a row I got maybe 10 clear frames total. On the drive home I remembered an old forum post about stacking just the clear parts of a sequence using a program called DeepSkyStacker. You manually pick the frames that have no clouds and it aligns them for you. I tried it with 8 frames from that trip and the result looked way cleaner than I expected. The background was smoother and the stars popped more than any single frame I took. Has anyone else salvaged a bad night with selective stacking like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

abbyr961mo ago

I've actually used DeepSkyStacker a fair bit, and just a little correction there - it's best for stacking deep sky objects like nebulae and galaxies, not really for wide-angle Milky Way shots like you'd take at Cherry Springs. It can work if you're using a tracking mount and have longer exposures, but for untracked star photos with a standard lens, something like Sequator or Starry Landscape Stacker handles it much better. Those programs are made for landscape astrophotography and deal with the distortion from wide lenses. I've had a few cloudy nights myself where I only got a handful of usable shots, and selective stacking with Sequator saved them just like you described. It really is a great feeling to turn a frustrating night into something worthwhile.

jake_walker1mo ago

And that's exactly why I always tell people to just bring a tripod and try it, even if the forecast looks iffy, you never know what you'll get.