Hit 100 clear shots of Jupiter this month and it kind of blew my mind

I've been messing around with my old 8 inch Dobsonian for about 6 months now. Last night I was going through my hard drive and noticed I had exactly 100 photos of Jupiter from this month alone. That number surprised me because I only head out maybe 3 or 4 nights a week after dinner. It hit me that I'm actually getting consistent captures instead of just fuzzy blobs now. Has anyone else suddenly realized they've got way more data than they thought they did?

4 comments

4 Comments

jade5171mo agoTop Commenter

That 100 number really makes you stop and think. I've been doing this with a different hobby - baking bread - and noticed the same thing last month when I looked at my recipe notebook. Had like 40 entries for the same sourdough loaf just from March and April alone. It's wild how consistency sneaks up on you when you're not forcing it. You just keep showing up and suddenly you've got a pile of evidence that you're actually getting better. Makes me wonder what else in my life I'm improving at without even realizing it until I look back.

wendy1311mo agoMost Upvoted

@jade517 ever notice how the best kind of progress is the one you didn't even see coming? That sourdough notebook sounds like a pretty solid proof.

lindag331mo ago

Wow, I gotta push back on this a little... 100 shots of the same planet in one month doesn't necessarily mean you're improving, it might just mean you're taking a lot of photos without really getting picky about quality. Quantity can trick you into feeling productive when really you're just filling up a hard drive with repeats that look pretty similar. I'd say take a closer look at those 100 captures and ask yourself if you've actually nailed focus and detail more than just once or twice, because consistency means nothing if the results are just 100 different versions of mediocre.

hall.joel1mo ago

You ever just scroll through your camera roll and get hit with that kind of surprise? The 100 shots thing is real, and @jade517 nailed it about consistency. One trick that helped me was keeping a simple log on my phone of what settings I used each night, like exposure time and gain. That way when you look back at those 100 captures, you can actually see what worked and what didn't. It turned my random photos into real progress tracking. I also started deleting the worst ones right after each session, that way the number on my hard drive only shows the keepers. Makes the progress feel even more solid when you realize you've got 100 good ones instead of 100 tries.