My first try at stacking Jupiter photos was a total mess

I spent a whole night last fall trying to stack 200 frames of Jupiter from my backyard. The software kept crashing and I couldn't figure out why for weeks. It turned out I was using the wrong file format, something simple like saving them as JPEGs instead of TIFFs. That one mistake cost me about a month of clear nights before I got a decent image. Has anyone else had a basic file type issue ruin their astro processing?

2 comments

2 Comments

alexlewis20d ago

File formats are the worst hidden trap in this hobby. JPEG compression just destroys the fine detail you need for stacking planets. It's a classic beginner mistake that feels so obvious later. I lost a whole season of Saturn data to a similar issue with video codecs once. The software error messages never tell you the real problem either. It's always a brutal way to learn the basics.

quinn_nguyen20d ago

Yeah, @alexlewis is right about the error messages being useless. My old capture software would just freeze with no warning. The real kicker was learning that even some RAW formats from cameras have hidden compression. Spent ages thinking my focus was off when it was just the files.