Clearly Amazing Moon

Last night I took the best picture of the Moon I have ever been able to capture, using a 10.1 megapixel DSLR with a 300/480mm lens, a sturdy tripod, and a focusing method using "nearby" Jupiter which guaranteed maximum sharpness. (Maximum for me, that is -- of course if I had a camera-equipped telescope I could fill the photo frame with the moon, and I would have a better picture. But I digress.)

Here is a zoomed-in portion of the result:



Then, I took 24 more pictures just like it. So, all 25 photos were identical, except for different details getting smudged by the atmosphere and camera sensor noise. Combining them all together with RegiStax resulted in this photo, zoomed in to the same lunar region as in the image above:



To see the full impact of the improvement, you might want to look at a side-by-side comparison of the whole Moon, before and after stacking:



This calls for a paradigm shift. I had formerly known that image stacking was used by both amateur and professional astronomers, but didn't fully appreciate how it might benefit my casual efforts at sky-shooting. Now its impact to my work is "clearer." A lot clearer.