Stacking 500 frames taught me why I was wrong about lucky imaging

I used to think lucky imaging was just a gimmick, like stacking was cheating or something. But after trying it on Jupiter with my 8 inch dob in Austin last month, I finally got why it works. My single frames were garbage, but 500 stacked frames showed bands and the GRS clear as day. Now I shoot 60 second videos and let AutoStakkert do the work, anyone else switch over from long exposures to stacking?

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the_anthony9d ago

Did you try shooting in RGB rather than mono? I found the real game changer was splitting color channels before stacking. On my last Saturn run the red channel stacked so clean that the Cassini division just popped, while the blue channel was mush no matter how many frames I threw at it. That tells me we are not just fighting seeing, we are fighting atmospheric dispersion that hits each color differently, and nobody talks about that part of the workflow.

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