Spent 2 years shooting Jupiter wrong until a cloudy night fixed it

I always cranked the exposure way up trying to get detail in the bands, but everything came out blown out. Got fogged in last month and started messing with low exposure settings in the backyard just for practice. Turns out stacking 200 short frames at 1/60th of a second gives way more detail than 5 long ones. Anyone else figure out their big photo mistake this late?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_patricia1mo ago

...and that's the thing, isn't it. It's always the small, boring stuff that ends up teaching you the most. Like how I spent years pouring concrete slabs for sheds and they'd always crack in the same spot, then one day I watched a guy mix it way wetter than I ever did and tamp it down real slow, and suddenly those slabs held up for years. You gotta work with the material, not against it. Same with those photos, you were fighting the camera instead of letting it do what it does best.

henrycooper1mo ago

Stacking short exposures is exactly what changed my lunar shots too. Found that even with a cheap planetary camera, a few hundred short frames stacked in AS!3 pulled out craters I never saw with single long exposures. Patience with the software and letting it reject the blurry frames makes all the difference.