Oh how I love the power of stacking star images. This is a six image stack using the free stacking program Sequator. I also used Lightroom to pop the milky way and tone down the light pollution. This is shot about 90 straight west of Chicago and the light pollution out here is still pretty strong. I'm longing for the day I get to head out west to shoot some truly dark sky's.
Oh yes, stacking is magical. Your photo really reminds me that I need to give it a try again soon.
Also thanks for the tip about Sequator. It's just what I've been looking for. Doing it manually is a nightmare.
Do you perhaps have and hints as far as the stacked exposures go? Anything that works particularly well or doesn't work at all in conjunction with Sequator?
I use to stack manually in Photoshop and talk about a chore. I thought I was getting it down good when I could do a 10 image stack in about an hour. LOL Now it takes less than 5 minutes from the time I open the program, load the files, and have it processed and saved. I'm not doing anything different than what I did before. All my images used in the stack were shot with the same exposure values. For this one it was six images shot at ISO 3200. I didn't use any dark frames. I did process the images in lightroom first to correct the color and to pop the milky way like I would when I used Photoshop. Then I save the images as full sized TIFF's before loading them into Sequator. Then I'd take the TIFF. image processed by Sequator and play around with it in lightroom before saving the final image. maybe a little over kill IDK. There are a couple really good tutorials on YouTube by Milky Way Mike and Peter Zelinka.
Awesome.
I'll definitely also try to preprocess the images in PS before going to Sequator.
Thank you.