[Dennis]

Hi Josh

I think we guessed it was a little "tongue in cheek", but we've all been there, at the beginning of the astrophotography pilgrimage. Hence, you’ll get lots of encouragement, friendly advice and constructive criticism from the IIS community.

When you stack several images, as the Philips ToUcam does by capturing movie bursts (avi’s) or the Meade LPI by stacking in camera, there are many advantages as follows:

You can select the best, sharpest frames and discard the blurry ones.
Real detail on the planet (=signal) is reinforced or “added up”.
Unwanted stuff (=noise) is generally random and so it is not added up and its negative side effects tend to reduce, the more images you stack.

This is know as improving the Signal to Noise (S/N) ratio.

You cannot take a poorly focused of blurry avi and convert it into a great image just by stacking, but a well focused and correctly exposed avi will reveal some quite amazing details when you use wonderful (free) programs such as Registax to process the avi. The authors of these programs are the real heroes when it comes to producing great images.

Cheers

Dennis