Thought my neighbor's telescope shots were faked with Photoshop until he showed me the raw files
My neighbor Dave in Tucson has been posting these insane shots of the Orion Nebula for two months and I figured he was just really good with editing software. I finally asked him to show me his setup last weekend and he pulled up 400 individual 30-second exposures on his laptop, all unedited, and stacked them right in front of me. The whole process took about 45 minutes and the final image had way more detail than any single frame. But now I'm wondering if stacking counts as real astrophotography or if it's kind of cheating compared to a single long exposure. Dave says it's just a tool like any other, but I'm not so sure. Where do you draw the line between skill and processing?