Yeah, that's the Lonely Speck guy. Some cool techniques. He has an outstanding website.
Stacking does a good job of getting rid of noise. There's a free program called deep sky stacker that does the same thing but lets you add "dark frames" which are shots at the exact same exposure taken at the same time you take your regular exposures but with the lens cap on. The software detects stuck/hot pixles and uses the noise patterns in the dark frames to reduce the noise in the stack of normal exposures. Not user friendly but it does work. It has additional editing capabilities but I had zero luck with them. I just took the TIF file it created and put it in Photoshop.
I may go out Friday night if the weather holds and shoot again. Orion isn't visible until like 4am or so but I may try to improve on the Andromeda shot. There's also a cool spiral galaxy, Triangulum, near Andromeda that is pretty bright but much smaller. Don't think I have enough lens tho I might borrow a friends 75-300.
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