Hit 10,000 photos in my astro stack and the result was a blurry mess

Spent three nights last week shooting M31 from my backyard in Tucson. Thought more data was always better so I stacked 10,000 frames. Got a weird smeared blob instead of detail. Turns out half the frames had airplane trails or tracking drift I didn't catch early on. Should have culled harder at step one instead of piling junk on top of junk. Anyone else learn this the hard way?

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christopher5941mo ago

Did you catch that Cloudy Nights article about stacking only the top 25 percent of frames? Changed my whole workflow after I read it.