Tried my phone's night mode on a blurry blob in my yard, got a raccoon and a lesson about tripods
Last Tuesday I saw a weird gray shape on my fence in Nashville and snapped it with night mode, which stacked 8 shots and turned the blob into a pixelated mess with three glowing eyes. Turns out the eyes were just the neighbor's cat sitting behind a trash can lid, and the stacking smeared both animals together because my hands were shaking. So how do you all spot a real subject in a stacked low light shot versus two things blending into one?
Stacking will always smear anything that moves between frames, so the trick is to check the edges of your subject after the shot. A single animal has one clear outline, but if you see two overlapping shapes or doubled legs, that's two things getting mashed together. The three glowing eyes thing is a dead giveaway too, since real eyes don't multiply. Next time just brace your phone on the fence or a chair and shoot one frame instead of eight.