2 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: I’m totally cheating and I know it.
The main reason is sharpness. If you watch the moon through a telescope you’ll see features kind of warble & distort. You know it’s a crater, but its shape is constantly distorted. This is caused the atmosphere we are seeing through.
Modern research telescopes feature adaptive optics to correct for this effect. Those optics are not cheap, but taking a big number of frames and selecting the best fraction of them to stack effectively cancels out this effect and is much cheaper than adaptive optics. While o e single frame captured on a night with good seeing will give a nice, sharp moon, the stacked image will be sharper.
Comment by DrPat1967 at 09/03/2025 at 14:53 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This exactly, stacking removes minor imperfections caused by atmospheric wobble.