I think stacking frames is overrated for moon photos

I used to stack 200 frames of the moon like everyone says to do, but I stopped doing that about 6 months ago. One sharp image from my Celestron 8SE at 1/500th shutter gives me more detail than any stack ever did. The alignment software always softens the edges too much for my taste. Anyone else ditch stacking for single-frame lunar shots?

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james_ramirez1mo ago

Man that "softens the edges" thing is so real. My buddy Dave tried stacking his moon shots with his Sky-Watcher and the final image looked like someone smeared Vaseline on the lens. He spent like 3 hours aligning 100 frames in Registax and ended up deleting the whole thing. Next night he took one single exposure at ISO 200 and it was way sharper, you could see the little craters inside Copernicus clear as day.

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andrew7781mo ago

Funny how that same thing plays out everywhere else too. Like when people try to fix a recipe by adding ten different spices and end up ruining perfectly good pasta, or when someone spends an hour messing with phone camera settings and the default auto mode takes a better picture. There's this weird pride in doing the complicated thing, even when the simple thing works better. Sometimes the extra effort just adds noise, not quality. It's like we all forget that the moon is already bright and sharp, we just need to let it be. Less fiddling, more looking, that usually wins.

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