Guides to shooting and stacking the night sky
These are the guides on Star Trail Stacker, grouped by subject: shooting and stacking star trails, cameras and lenses, the Milky Way and nightscapes, deep sky, comet and planetary work, and getting your result into an editor.
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31 guides
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Watch
One real night through the whole tool, then one video for each mode, with chapters that open at the exact moment. All video guides.
Aurora
Whether the northern lights will show from where you stand tonight, read live from NOAA and the weather service, and how to photograph them when they do.
- Northern lights tonight One verdict for your pin: the oval over you and on your horizon, the dark hours, cloud by the hour, the Moon, and the ground darkness under you.
- Aurora forecast: the oval on the map NOAA OVATION drawn from the grid, Kp now and for three nights, the solar wind at Earth, the 27-day outlook, and a map that answers where you click.
- How to photograph the northern lights Settings that follow the aurora’s brightness instead of one recipe, focus and white balance, the sequence for a stack, and phones.
- The Kp index, and what it cannot tell you Kp now and for three days, the definitive GFZ series, and the latitude table with your own row marked.
- Geomagnetic storm today The G-scale now and forecast, the latest SWPC warning verbatim, and what each level means for the aurora at your latitude.
Star trails
Everything about turning a folder of exposures into arcs, and the two things that spoil them.
- How to photograph star trails The field guide: where to stand, what to carry, what to set and how long to stay — with twenty-four published tutorials compared and one real night measured.
- Your first star trail What to shoot, what to hand over, and which file to open next. Start here.
- Why a plain lighten stack loses faint trails The sky changes brightness through the night, and a plain maximum keeps the brightest sky instead of the faintest star.
- Why trails come out dotted The gap between exposures, in seconds and in pixels. How to prevent it outside, and how to repair it afterwards.
- Satellites are drawing lines through your trails There are tens of thousands of them now, and a lighten stack keeps every bright track they leave.
- Removing moving lines before stacking How neighbouring photographs expose aircraft, satellite and meteor tracks before one full-resolution stack is built.
- What a star-trail stacker should do A plain-English comparison: what most stackers do, what this one does, and where it is honestly no better.
- Star trail stacking on a Mac Sequator and StarTrails.de are Windows-only. What actually runs on macOS, what is proven in Safari, and where each one fits.
Camera and lens
What the equipment does to the frame before any software sees it.
- The 500 rule, and your sensor Why the old rule is too generous on a modern sensor, why it ignores where you point, and why trails want the opposite.
- Full frame vs crop, honestly Full frame starts ahead. The gap is smaller than the forums claim, and stacking narrows it further.
- Why corner stars look like seagulls What a fast lens does wide open, why stacking cannot fix it, and how much of it a stop or two removes.
- What your lens does to the frame A 14 mm lens moves the edge of your frame by tens of pixels. Read the measured number for your own lens.
The Milky Way and nightscapes
The wide sky, the ground under it, and the town on the horizon.
- Shooting the Milky Way How to shoot the arch from a fixed tripod, stack the sky while the ground stays sharp, and finish it in Lightroom.
- Why the Milky Way disappears Two frames from the same camera: a Bortle 2 sky in Tenerife, and a washed teal glow over a rural European field.
- Fixed-ground nightscapes How the sky and the ground become two separate products, and the reconstruction this tool refuses to attempt.
Deep sky, comet and planetary
The tracked targets, and the frames you build before you shoot them.
- Registered deep-sky integration Mean, exact median or sigma-clipped mean over registered Lights, and why clipping refuses fewer than eight.
- Comet stacking, decision by decision Mark every nucleus yourself and get three results: stars sharp, comet sharp, and the composite on one grid.
- Planetary SER lucky stacking Rank the frames of a capture and stack the best of them, several fractions at once, because the right one is not knowable in advance.
- Calibration masters Reusable dark, flat, bias and dark-flat masters from your own RAW groups, and the groups it will not mix.
- Bringing out faint structure Wavelet sharpening by scale: what it lifts, what it deliberately leaves alone, and why the Float32 file never changes.
- Does drizzle help your night Drizzle only helps if your frames landed on different parts of the pixel. This measures that and tells you either way.
The tool and your files
What goes in, what comes out, and what it will not do.
- What it can read Every file type accepted, what happens to each, and which of them a real file has been through rather than a fixture.
- Which browsers it runs in Memory per browser, the version the RAW decoder needs, what Safari and Firefox cannot do, and how to add it to the Dock.
- Calibration frames Darks, flats, bias and dark-flats: what each one fixes, how to shoot it, how many, and which of them a star-trail night actually needs.
- What it refuses, and why Every refusal it can put on your screen, what each one means, and a glossary of the words it uses.
- Into Lightroom and PixInsight Which of the two files it writes to open where, and the one mistake that quietly ruins a deep-sky integration.
