Quote:
Originally Posted by The_bluester
From what I can see you need to work around the limitations of the 1600 or other cams using the same chip. You see people using often not longer than 120 second subs to avoid saturation in terms of the 12 bit output and living with bright stars having the microlens diffraction/reflection issue (Or framing to try to avoid them)
Without the reflection issue I would probably look at one as a stepping stone to mono imaging even with the 12 bit conversion, but I just can't come at the reflections myself.
In some ways I wish my SVX80 presented with ugly stars in the corners testing with my wifes full frame DLSR, it would make my APS-C versus full frame decision easy and I would lash out on an ASI2600 tomorrow.
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One thing you may want to test, if possible, is using a different full frame camera to the Nikon D3. For a number of years I used a Nikon D700 (the non-professional version of the D3); it’s a 12MP full frame with an anti-aliasing filter.
The best example I ever experienced was using a Nikon 85mm F/1.8 with the D700. I have used that lens at F/1.8 in astro and it showed amazing stars almost to the edge of the frame. A little while after that I bought a D7200 (24MP APS-C) and used that lens for daylight photography and it was unusable. I tried it once for astro and even down to F/8 it showed massive amounts of star bloat, horrendous star shapes from only a little way off-axis. After purchasing the D7200 I sold that lens a week later. On the D700 it was magic though!
Whats the point here?
The sensor in the D3/D700 covers up a multitude of lens sins. On my 5” F/5 the stars were the same in the centre as at the edge. With my ASI094 there is some star deformity towards the edge as would be expected but the D700 was perfect. It’s a camera with 8.45 micron pixels which results in a 20 micron blur! It also has a peak QE not much over 40%