I thought stacking 40 frames was overkill until my Orion shot at 2am actually came out clean
For the first two months I shot single 30 second subs of M42 and kept wondering why the core was blown out and the faint stuff was all grain. Posted one of those noisy messes on here and someone asked how many frames I stacked. I said one. He said try 40 and just align them in DeepSkyStacker, it's free. Took me three tries to get the settings right and the first good result came out at 2:15am on a Tuesday from my driveway. The noise dropped off a cliff. Now I feel kind of dumb for all those nights I settled for one frame. How many are you all actually stacking for bright nebulae before you call it done?