Can you reduce astrophotography noise by duplicating one exposure and randomizing the noise?
Asked 7/3/2018
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I’m learning astrophotography and usually stack multiple exposures to improve signal-to-noise, but alignment can be difficult when the image needs both rotation and translation. I wondered if there’s a shortcut: could I duplicate a single exposure several times and somehow randomize the noise in each copy, so I could get the benefit of stacking without taking multiple frames? Is there any software that can do this, and would it help preserve stars?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
8y ago
2 Answers
32
To achieve what you're thinking of you would have to know what the noise was.
If you knew what the noise was then you could just remove that to get clean images.
Originally by user14028. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user14028
8y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
No. Duplicating one exposure and “randomizing” it won’t give the same benefit as stacking real, separate exposures.
Stacking works because the true signal (stars, nebulae, etc.) is consistent from frame to frame, while noise varies randomly between exposures. When you align and combine multiple real images, the repeated signal reinforces and the random noise averages down.
With only one image, you don’t have independent samples. Any software trying to invent or randomize noise is just guessing—it cannot know which pixel variations are real faint stars and which are noise. If it suppresses low-level variations too aggressively, it can remove actual stars (“star eating”) and reduce dynamic range.
So the practical answer is: no software can turn one exposure into the equivalent of a properly stacked set of multiple exposures. The solution is still to capture multiple frames and align them accurately, including rotation if needed. That separate data is what makes noise reduction by stacking possible.
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