>>4209257I never really did much when it comes to /astro/, but played a bit with it when hiking. Took this with an a6300 and a cheap Samyang 12mm f2.0, ISO 1600, 25sec, pano of 2 or 3 shots. I probably overprocessed it too much through LR, but whatever.
I have a question though. This shot is just a single exposure pic (well 2 or 3 pics for the pano, but at heart still on 25sec exposure). So far, I never played with all the stacking possibilities offered by PC software (Sequator looks like a simple one that would cover my basic needs if I dive into stacking). If I understand right, stacking allows me to take, say, 30 shots of the same area from my fixed tripod, and then the stacking algorithm will realign the stars that have moved a bit between my 30 shots, and on top of it, the algorithm will cancel as much noise as possible. Sounds perfect in principle. Less noise, more good data to then work with in Lightroom or whatever.
But that's on the software side. On the hardware side, does that also mean I could go to way higher ISO? I stayed at 1600 because 3200 was so so. Does the power of stacking allows me to go to 3200 or 6400? How high can we comfortably go before the stacking algorithm shits itself? This point is rarely discussed on when it comes to stacking tutorials.
The subsequent question is, instead of having to deal with wide and fast lenses (f2 or ideally f1.4), does the power of stacking allow me to use a f4 lens instead? Or do I still have to aim for wide and fast? Like, would f4 and 60 stacked pics be equivalent to f2 and 30 stacked pics when it comes to data I can exploit in post? I doubt so, because gathered light would still be low, but what do I know. Ideally I'd aim for wide and "just" ~f4.0 when hiking. Fast lenses are heavy and useless for 95% of my landscape snapshits.
tl;dr: does stacking through software allow to use higher ISO and slower lenses? Thus bringing less expensive and heavy lenses when hiking for milky way shootan.
