I've been doing this hobby for about 9 years and have enjoyed every step of the journey. When It comes to processing, there is a lot I've been able to grasp, and execute, but I feel as if I've only scratched the surface. I often think of myself as a race car driver who has become decent at driving the car but who lacks a thorough understanding as to what exactly is going on under the hood. After almost a decade, I've developed a processing approach that suites me but when I'm confronted with situations where I need to do things differently, I'm almost embarrassed to ask questions that I'm sure are basic in nature, but the truth is, I don't know the answer...again, I've gotten decent of just driving the car.
Setting aside my reluctance to ask the questions, the following is my current dilemma and I'd be curious how others manage. I use the RASA 11 as my primary home observatory scope. I mount a 2600mm on it during nebula season, and a 183mm on it during galaxy season. I have gone from a total acquisition time of about 10hurs per subject, to 40-50 hours per subject and I'm finding that, with age, I'm becoming more patient and simply enjoy going deeper with each subject session. With long term multiple night sessions, the files really begin to add up. Due to the speed of the RASA 11, I shoot at gain 0 for a 60 second exposure and even that is more exposure than I'd prefer (life's a balance...trying to keep # of exposures down). I'd prefer unity gain but the amount of exposure is just too much, for me, in order to satisfy unity.
My question: For a typical 50-hour project, I'm looking at roughly 3000 files to process. After each night's session, I'll manually process : blink > initial weeding > calibrate > subframeselctor second weed > Register. I get the concept of PSF Signal weighting, ranking each individual sub and thus I will integrate all 3000 at once. When doing them all at once, I'm confident that the stacking is in good order, stacked against each subs ranked weight. However, this task is daunting and time consuming (even for a fast system). I'd prefer to process and stack each night's session, going through the procedure referenced above. I promise there is a question coming lol. Let's say I have 10 stacks, from 10 different nights. Will the end result be the same when stacking the 10 stacked sub's vs stacking all 3000 at once? And....should I use PSF Signal Weighting for the 10 stacks that have already undergone this weighting when I stacked each one individually? If not, how should you normalize and weight those 10 stacks before integrating them?
Hope this make sense. It would be a much easier process to be able to store the stacks and then integrate them all together once the project is complete. But, I'm not sure how the weighting works and don't want to loose any precious signal. Any insight would be much appreciated.
