Just realized I was stacking 40 lights on Jupiter for two years when 12 would have done it | Astronomy Photos

Wade Young · 2026-10-23T23:25:04.964779+00:00

I got into astrophotography back in 2019 with a beat up Canon and a kit lens, and for the longest time my Jupiter shots looked like a fuzzy orange blob no matter what I did. Last weekend I was out in the driveway in Tucson around 11pm and a guy from my local club looked at my histogram and said "you're clipping the planet, your stack is just smearing your own noise around." Turns out I had been shooting at ISO 1600 and stacking 40 frames of pure glow, thinking more frames always equals more detail. I dropped to ISO 400, shot 12 frames, and the cloud bands on the planet actually showed up for the first time. Two years of noise, gone, because I never once checked the actual pixel values on a single frame. I also started using any real stacking software instead of the free tool I'd been fighting with, and the difference was not small. So what's the dumb thing you did for way too long before someone pointed at your screen and set you straight?

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Just realized I was stacking 40 lights on Jupiter for two years when 12 would have done it | Astronomy Photos - The Design Community Hub