Saturn photo left me doubting my stacking software for a week

Last Tuesday I shot Saturn through my 8 inch dob with a 2x barlow, got about 4,000 frames. Stacked them in Autostakkert like always, and the result looked soft, almost like a watercolor smear. I blamed the seeing and nearly deleted the capture, but on a whim I re-stacked just 800 frames from the same video last night. The banding and ring division popped out way sharper than the full stack, it blew my mind. Anyone else seen better results with fewer frames on bright planets, or was I just fighting bad transparency that night?

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michael_craig18d ago

Yep, same thing happened to me on Jupiter last month, less frames came out way cleaner.