[Atmos (Colin)]

My plan for this coming new moon has been to do a 36 panel mosaic of the Milky Way with my Nikon D7200 and a Sigma Art 85mm F/1.4. It's FOV will be kinda similar to that of my 14mm + D7200 but as a 3.5 gigapixel image.

The star shapes with the D7200 @ F/2.8 at the frame corners are reasonable, reasonable enough that I'd consider using it again although I may test dropping it a fraction slower to see how much things tighten up. I know that I would be able to get 2x300s images per panel per night so the end result would basically be the number of nights I spent out doing the imaging.

About an hour and a half ago I started thinking about the possibility of blowing the dust off of my D700, doing a 16 panel with an even larger FOV and running the Sigma @ F/1.4!

The D700 is a 12mp FX sensor with 8.445 micron pixels and an anti-aliasing filter. The D7200 is a 24mp APS-C sensor with 3.91 micron pixels and no anti-aliasing filter. In short, I think I could run the D700 @ F/1.4 and still have near perfect stars in the frame corners!

As much as I love the idea of the resolution that the D7200 achieves, there is a part of me that wants to see what the sky looks like with 30 minutes per panel (per night) @ F/1.4! There is another part of me that also knows that there is greater contrast to be achieved with higher resolution.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?