Showerthought: Trying to stack photos of Jupiter took me 4 hours last night

I spent forever fiddling with stacking settings in Registax to get a clear shot of Jupiter from my backyard in Ohio. Turned out my capture frame rate was too low and I wasted 3 hours tweaking gamma instead. Anyone else have a simple thing that took way too long to figure out with planetary imaging?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_angela1mo ago

Read that low frame rates are actually the biggest trap for new planetary imagers, everyone goes for gamma first instead. Switched to 60fps with shorter exposure and suddenly Jupiter looked way better in the stack.

wren_brown1mo ago

Yeah I read somewhere that frame rate is the hidden variable that screws everyone up at first (myself included). Someone on Cloudy Nights broke it down really simply: you need enough frames to average out the atmospheric jello, and low FPS means you're stacking way fewer clean frames in the same amount of time. I was so focused on trying to fix the gamma and color balance that I didn't even think about dropping my exposure to 15ms and cranking the gain. Once I made that switch, the difference was honestly night and day even with my cheap planetary camera. Made me feel a little dumb for all those nights spent fighting with the settings wrong.