Orion from my bedroom window

Here is a single frame of Orion from my bedroom window (with the window closed!) 13 sec ISO 400 f/3.5 at 14mm using the kit lens.

No editing of this jpg, aside from cropping and doing an autolevels.

Would stacking a bunch of these in deep sky stacker show more stars or would that just increase the background light pollution (which is very high here- near NYC.)

Astrobin plate solved it for me to label all the stars they can detect (click on it to get full res):

https://www.astrobin.com/kje32b/

I'm still wondering whether stacking a bunch of these with DSS would bring out even fainter stars or would it increase the light pollution?

Stacking doesn't increase the light pollution.  It does increase the signal to noise by average out the random noise created by your camera.

To see more stars you need to subtract the light pollution from your image and then stretch the signals from those stars to make them brighter.

Having less noise allows you to stretch further.

Never tried it from such light polluted skies but other forum members have previously got some stunning results from city areas.

Stacking from RAW rather than jpg will be important

Hope that's somewhat helpful

OllieN wrote:

Stacking doesn't increase the light pollution. It does increase the signal to noise by average out the random noise created by your camera.

To see more stars you need to subtract the light pollution from your image and then stretch the signals from those stars to make them brighter.

Having less noise allows you to stretch further.

Never tried it from such light polluted skies but other forum members have previously got some stunning results from city areas.

Stacking from RAW rather than jpg will be important

Hope that's somewhat helpful

Thanks, I will stack them then, I took about 20 images using these same settings!

Here is the original unedited image so you can get some idea of how bad the light pollution is here.

Should I stack using the crop (with autolevels applied) or should I stack using the original unedited subframes and edit later?

OutsideTheMatrix wrote:

Should I stack using the crop (with autolevels applied) or should I stack using the original unedited subframes and edit later?

I don't know if it matters; I would stack unedited frames.

The important thing is to export the images from your raw converter as 16 bit tiffs, then process further, starting with stacking in DSS.

David