I've often wondered why it is that when you look at Jupiter through the telescope, for the first few seconds it often appears very bland, then dark bands appear, then maybe after 10 or 15 seconds you realise the Great Red Spot is also visible.  I've never read a good explanation for this.  What I've read is 'Keep Looking' and your eye needs to be trained or become acustomed to the view.  I think this is true but doesn't explain why details become visible.

I've always thought it is somehow related to persistence of vision.  That's the effect you get when you look at a venetian blind (horizontal blinds) and turn away.  You retain the image of the blinds for up to a minute in some cases.  Likewise glancing at a bright light bulb does the same.  Persistence of vision is why we see movies, when in actual fact we are only being shown still frames, flashed rapidly one after the other. 

Processing my Mars video the other night I was struggling to wring more detail out of my bland low contrast unprocessed image and it occured to me that indeed it is persistence of vision that allows our eyes to reveal detail very hard to capture in photos.  Here's the proof.  When you play your Mars or Jupiter video clip (assuming it is of reasonable quality) you see planetary details, polar ice caps, surface marking, etc.  But if you pause the video and advance frame by frame, you will see a hopelessly noisy low contrast image, often completely (on my low price camera vidoe clips anyway) devoid of detail.  But as you watch these stills flashed rapidly in front of your eyes, you suddenly see a wealth of detail that doesn't exist on any of the individual frames.

Your eye/brain is effectively stacking images on the fly just as we do when using Registax to arrive at a final stacked and clearer image.  How bizzare!  And how great!  Of course I have no research to prove this and its pure conjecture, but when the data fits, use it!  Looking through a telescope is highly subjective, but not so much with a video clip - it is real data that can be exactly repeated.

Wonder if anyone else has considered this phenomenon?