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There's a bit of difference between the aims of astrophotography and professional astronomy.

Ones getting a subjectively good image where the other is getting an objectively good quantitative measurement.

Do the software "tricks" really translate that well. If they did, these terrestrial telescopes wouldn't engineered to the tune of billions.

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Stacking isn't a "trick". It's mathematics.

I agree my aim is to make pretty pictures, and professional astronomy is to take accurate imagery, but up until I'm making subjective calls about colors, they're not too far apart before the image is stretched to a non linear histogram.

After all, I can't build pretty pictures on crappy data. Astrophotography is a heck of a lot of math

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