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Tried stacking 47 frames of the moon in free software and got a glowing blob instead
Last Saturday I finally got a clear night here in Reno so I pointed my little 70mm scope at the moon and shot 47 raw frames with my phone held up to the eyepiece. I loaded all of them into a free stacking program, hit go, and waited 20 minutes for it to spit out a soft glowing blob with zero craters, like a flashlight behind a bedsheet. Turns out 46 of my frames were slightly out of focus because the phone mount kept slipping every time I touched it. Lesson learned: lock everything down before you start, because no amount of stacking will fix bad focus. Anyone got a phone-to-eyepiece mount that actually stays put?
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theaj196d ago
Man, that stings. Waiting 20 minutes just to get a fuzzy nightlight has to be one of the worst feelings in this hobby. I did almost the same thing last winter with Jupiter, got a mushy orange ball and could not figure out why until I noticed the focus had crept on me between shots. The slipping mount is the real killer because you do not see it happening in the dark, you just find out later when the stack falls apart. Locking down the focus with a piece of tape on the drawtube saved me more than once.
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