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rogerg
14-10-2015, 03:05 PM
Hi all,

I was inspired for a couple of nights this week to whip the camera outside when my 10 week old baby woke us up at ~2am. Each night carrying her to be changed I checked out the night sky through the living room window and couldn't resist the allure of a dark clear sky with Orion shining in at me!

This photograph is from the second night which was clearer, and while only a short series of exposures (15 x 60s) it was simple-as to do, and the no-fuss astrophotography I needed at 2am before going back to bed.

I continue to be impressed by the Fuji sensor, and the clarity of this 27mm f/2.8 lens which has no coma or other defects other than a little vignetting.

http://www.astrobin.com/219318/
http://www.astrobin.com/full/219318/0/

Fuji XE-2 camera
Fujinon XF 27mm f/2.8 lens
ISO 6400
15 x 60s
Tracked on Polarie.

Processing: Lightroom, PixInsight, Photoshop.

:thumbsup:

One thing that does annoy me about the camera or lens (not sure which to blame really) is the ability to focus. It's quite hard to achieve sharp focus - The fly-by-wire lens has perhaps not fine grained enough movements, and the camera needs to provide higher zoom magnification to see clearly when stars are in focus.

I'm on the hunt again for Fuji lenses, inspired by the camera's performance. For now I've settled on a Canon EF to Fuji X-mount adapter to try out my canon lenses for only the $89 cost of the adapter. The decision of which Fuji lens is fraught with danger, having no hands-on access to try them first.

Roger.

Ryderscope
14-10-2015, 03:12 PM
Very nice Roger. Did you need to use any in camera noise reduction for this?
R

rogerg
14-10-2015, 03:16 PM
I dislike the management of RAW files from the Fuji so shoot Raw+JPG all the time and usually just work with the JPGs. The in-camera settings for astrophotography are always -2 for noise (minimum) (applied to the JPGs only). However in this case I found even that looked soft, so I persisted with using the RAWs and in doing so applied slight luminance noise correction and more generouse colour noise reduction to each frame in Lightroom before batching to TIF for further processing. Arguable I should've just applied the noise reduction post-stacking in PS but ... oh well, it worked :)

topheart
15-10-2015, 03:21 PM
Hi Roger,

This image is very nice indeed......It is very well captured. I love the way you have captured the Orion real estate !

I agree - there is nothing like being allured by the Orion constellation beckoning us to look up and image!

Thanks,
Tim

gregbradley
15-10-2015, 03:44 PM
Very nice Roger.

After a fairly exhaustive series of threads on DPreview about RAW converters for Fuji I settled on PhotoNinja and Capture 1. Several are good including Capture 1.

Adobe Lightroom is the worst.

Greg.

rogerg
15-10-2015, 04:40 PM
Thanks Tim :) Orion stands out so clearly ... it's hard to avoid :)



Oh that's very interesting Greg. I use and love Noise Ninja but have not yet upgraded to PhotoNinja. Recently I was in communication with them about it but got distracted. I might just go and buy PhotoNinja in this case. I don't particularly get along with Lightroom in general.

BeanerSA
15-10-2015, 07:56 PM
That's great. I'm a big fan of that shot.

Regulus
15-10-2015, 08:21 PM
That's a really pleasing photo to look at Roger.
I immediately thought the composition would be unbalanced but it's not; Sirius holds it's own against the whole of Orion. Really well done.

Trev

rogerg
16-10-2015, 10:52 AM
Thanks, much appreciated :thumbsup:



Yes, perhaps surprising but it does work. I think this one below which is still popular is from 2002 using Provia 400 slide flim ... similar balance but different crop :)

http://astrophotography.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Dec2003F25-Orion-to-Sirus.jpg

DJT
18-10-2015, 09:12 PM
That's a lovely image Roger. Framed well, colours are good and a really interesting FOV.

Cheers

rogerg
19-10-2015, 12:02 PM
Thanks David :)