Can you create a higher-resolution night-sky image by stacking many untracked short exposures?

Asked 7/14/2015

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Is it practical to simulate a tracking mount in software by shooting thousands of short, wide-angle night-sky exposures on a fixed tripod, then aligning the stars, correcting lens distortion/field rotation, and stacking them for super-resolution instead of star trails?

The idea is to use the stars as control points, estimate motion and distortion across frames, and combine the images into a cleaner, sharper, higher-resolution result. Does this run into fundamental limits with untracked wide-field images, or can it work in principle?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

11y ago

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Superresolution techniques require pretty good source data to start with, and that source data usually needs slight offsets between each frame (dithering.) Without a tracking mount, you will see field rotation in the corners of the frames, and that will greatly diminish your ability to align and stack, let alone apply superresolution. Distortion mapping can be done to correct distortion among frames, however that is algorithmically complex, and I only know of one software package that really does that well.

Your looking to surmount a number of very high hurdles to produce "superresolution wide field" astrophotography without a mount. You could get significantly better results, and actually make the concept viable, if you just add a tracking mount. That would eliminate most problems (assuming no landscape was visible in the field). For superresolution ("drizzling", as it's usually called in the astro world) to be effective, you need to dither between each sub frame, and you need LOTS of sub frames. To gain an increase in resolution, at the cost of noise, you can drizzle 20-30 sub frames of the same region of sky, and that would improve resolution. Drizzling works in such a way that it trades off the noise reduction you get with straight stacking to improve resolution. To get both resolution enhancement and noise reduction via stacking, you need more on the order of 200 sub frames...of the same region of sky.

Now, if you are looking to do a high resolution, low noise panoramic view of the night sky (milky way), then your probably looking at getting multiple panels of overlapping regions of the sky, with about 200 sub frames each. If you want a four panel panorama, you're looking at 800 sub frames. Assuming you're going with 30 second subs, that would be nearly 7 hours of total exposure time. Ultra wide panoramas like this usually require a few extra panels to plug in the holes that occur as the panels are distortion corrected (warped) to fit properly with each other...so instead of four panels, you might actually need seven, which extends the exposure time into the 12 hour range, so multiple nights.

Drizzling can certainly improve the detail of a final image, but it is really not actually all that necessary in the end. With a tracking mount, you can get away with only using one frame per panel in a mosaic if you have dark skies (which are usually necessary for milky way imaging.) Drizzling is usually more effective for wide field DSO (which is much narrower than your average milky way image). With a medium-wide focal length of 50mm to 250mm, one frame per panel, and an effective tracking mount, you can get some very nice results:

Originally by user124. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user124

11y ago

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AI Answer

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In principle, yes—but in practice it’s very difficult with untracked, wide-angle frames.

The biggest issues are:

  • You need sub-pixel variation/dithering for super-resolution to help much.
  • Field rotation occurs without a tracking mount, especially toward the edges, making accurate alignment much harder.
  • Lens distortion can vary across the frame; wide lenses can have complex distortion that aligns one area but smears another.
  • Atmospheric and optical blur limit how much extra detail can actually be recovered.

Stars are useful control points, so software could track bright stars, estimate camera motion, and refine alignment. So the concept is not impossible. But getting reliable, whole-frame super-resolution from thousands of fixed-tripod images is algorithmically hard, and edge quality is likely to suffer.

For real improvement, a tracking mount makes the approach far more viable by removing most of the rotation/alignment problems. If your goal is simply a good wide-field night-sky image, a single short exposure with a fast wide lens at high ISO may already give strong results without the complexity.

So: possible in theory, limited in practice, and much more effective with tracking.

UniqueBot

AI

11y ago

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