Best amount of images for stacking

imperial wrote:

Alen K wrote:

You probably missed imperial's other thread asking how to fix a problem with blur in the foreground of a nightscape that was caused by wind-induced motion. Maybe not coincidentally, the number of 10-second light frames that imperial took for that one was 25.

So, it would seem imperial's immediate interest is nightscapes, and untracked ones at that. Imperial will be quite surprised to hear that for one of those, he, she or they could "get away with" only a mere hour's worth of exposures.

Yeah, I've also learned milkyway is considered nightscape and not astro. I do know about those star trackers but man anything beyond 1 min would be insane to me already.

If a nightscape has a lot of starry sky in it (most of them do, but not technically required), then personally I consider such an image to qualify as an astrophoto.

When I started doing astrophotography, it was with film (back in the Stone Age :D), which was so insensitive that untracked exposures were unthinkable. So, I have almost always done tracked. That has many advantages and few disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is “more complication.” That has gone away for me because I now use a Pentax with Astrotracer.

Pentax is not for everyone but for me it has made taking wide-field images easier. That image I linked to in an earlier reply was a mosaic of nine one-minute shots with a 28mm lens tracked with Astrotracer. That would have taken a total of over 50 untracked exposures. Had I used an external tracker, doing the mosaic would have taken some extra hardware (to keep the camera level, etc.).

There are plenty of small trackers that can be used with lenses up to maybe 135mm. One of those might make sense as the next step in your astrophotography journey.