Star Stacking: Working with Night Images

Our speaker for this Star Stacking Workshop is NGPC member Stephanie Hon.

Star stacking is a method of overlaying multiple night sky exposures of the same composition, aligning the images so the stars all line up between each exposure, then averaging the brightness & color values of those exposures, producing a result with far less noise than a single exposure. Star stacking not only reduces the noise of a night photo, it can also improve clarity and sharpness of night sky celestials objects. The most popular way to stack night sky photos for beginners is with star stacking software. In this tutorial, Stephanie focuses on a technique where she stacks multiple frames of a night sky image. She’ll talk about the software used to create the stacked image and introduce us to a few star stacking applications. In the final part of the tutorial, she’ll show how she does a very popular technique – applying meteors to the final stacked image.