Hot take: shooting the moon at 1/500 got me sharper craters than any tripod shot
I read somewhere that a fast shutter beats a steady mount for lunar shots, so I tried it on a whim from my driveway in Tucson. I shot 60 frames at 1/500, ISO 400, and stacked the best 40 in free software. The result was way sharper than the 4 second tripod exposures I had been proud of for 3 years. Turns out the atmosphere wobbles more than my hands do, and the fast shutter freezes that. My old shots look like soup next to these. Now I want to test it on Jupiter, but I am not sure the same idea holds up for planets. Anyone here shoot fast and stack instead of going long?
So the thing that made the biggest jump for you was freezing the air itself, not just your shaky hands, right? Planets sit way lower in the sky for most of us, so you are stacking through more soup than the moon ever gives you, which usually means lucky imaging at stupid fast speeds and thousands of frames. What camera and scope are you working with, since that changes whether fast and stack even works at that scale?