Always skipped stacking until I saw a 3-hour single frame

I spent a year shooting planets and moon shots, never bothering with stacking because single frames looked fine at low zoom. Then I tried stacking 200 frames of Jupiter from a session in Austin and the detail on the bands just popped, even at 200% crop. The trick that got me was using a free program called Registax with the wavelet sliders, which I always thought were overhyped. Now I wonder if I missed out on a ton of detail in all my old shots of Saturn's rings. Anyone else have a moment where a processing tool you avoided turned out to be the missing piece?

1 comments

1 Comment

parker_jones501mo ago

Stacking has its place but a single good frame caught at the right moment can beat 200 mediocre ones, especially for Saturn where the atmosphere shifts so fast. Registax just averages out the lucky hits along with the blurry ones, so you're really polishing a compromise.