Hi Dave,
I am in the dark as to the absolute way stacking works. The assumption I made after reading comments from Alex was that the greater the stack the more very fine detail would be shown in the final image.
I used DeepSkyStacker ( freebee on Sky at Night magazine ) and loaded say 35 frames plus 1 darkframe. You cannot see all the frames you have loaded which is a bit of a miffer. After loading, the light frames are registered. During that process each frame is given a score and the program uses say the best 80% for the stack. During the registration process you can see the star count for each frame. I started with a count of about 530 max and ended up with a count of around 1200 by the time I was stacking previously stacked images. Darkframe subtraction only takes place during the stacking process and I included a darkframe ( same one ) for each stack operation.
I have attached the first stack I made. This was from 35 frames plus 1 darkframe using the best 80%.
Don
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