Quote:
Originally Posted by Meru
Thanks for your compliment guys!
Andrew,
Wow that image is beautiful!! The field is so flat – extremely impressed with the noise level considering only 12 shots being 5 minutes long. Yea the ISO3200 is a bit nuts but nothing 80 or so shots can’t take care of  Did you use any darks? You must also have a dark site, to get that much detail. I ended up buying a cheapie timer from Deal Extreme, so that should allow me to experiment with long shutter speeds and ISO settings. |
Thanks - my dark site is 100km from Perth, so it's reasonably dark. I did take flats and darks that night, but I did the darks after going to sleep shortly before dawn (you need that programmable cable release
)and it was around 2 degrees, so there's less noise in the darks than the lights - you can see plenty of noise at full zoom.
That was my first attempt at SLR astrophotography in 15 years, so any credit goes to the hardware in my case. The D800 impresses me more each time I use it, and seems to be a great match to a good short APO.
Can't wait to see what you get from a dark sky, the lack of noise in those images is amazing given the iso you were running at. Your guiding looks pretty tight too.
cheers,
Andrew.