Does anyone know if the Nikon D300s is good for astro wide fields? The time has come to ditch all my Pentax gear and switch. Looking at 3200 ISO shots with my 4.5mm f/2.8 fisheye and 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye whole milky way shots. Is the high ISO performance any good? At present ,use a Fuji S5 pro.Pretty mediocre at 3200 with the 4.5mm. Any ideas?
I have been using a D700 and having some success and also some problems. It has been working quite well for wide fields like those you're talking about. Where I have run into problems is with longer lenses. When I have very bright stars in the FOV I'm getting horizontal red coloured banding across the picture when I stretch it. Initially, I thought this was only at ISO 3200 and above, but now I'm finding it at lower ISOs. I'm still trying to analyse the problem and figure out if this is a feature of the D700 (there are some comments about "banding" on various Internet fora) or a problem with my camera.
These comments may not apply to the D300s and you may not care if you're only doing very wide shots. Just thought I'd urge some caution... I love the camera for terrestrial stuff, BTW.
Just out of curiosity, how much are you stretching?
Stretch any image, at any ISO, out of any camera, enough, and you'll find horizontal and vertical banding.
I know this is a real pain in the rear when doing Milky Way widefields, but, I feel that the best approach to this is the traditional blend; one for sky, one for foreground.
I'm finding this in pics that only include sky and no foreground. It is possible that I'm pushing things too far. I have been known to do that occasionally I'm using break-point ranges in ImagesPlus that the documentation classifies as "high," "aggressive" and "very aggressive." The pics look great apart from the banding.
Nah, they don't Greg, not to my knowledge, anyway.
Although, there's ways of removing it. I'm working on a procedure at the moment (whenever I get time) to see if I can remove any banding present in images which are pushed 2-stops (I shoot low ISO images and therefore it's not really apparent). I figure it's a waste of time as I never do night time widefields as the original poster, but, it's always good fun pushing your knowledge of processing.
I wonder if that banding disappears with some flats, bias and darks applied. I imagine they would go if you did those 3 things.
I am using darks and I'm planning to experiment with bias frames soon. I am also going to start using flats once I get a light box together... I'll see if that helps with the banding, but my suspicion is that it won't. In my case, at least, it's an artifact caused by small, bright objects and doesn't seem related to read out noise, thermal noise or uneven illumination of the sensor. Thanks for the suggestion though, Greg! I'm sure that adding bias frames and flats to my regime will be a good thing. In the worst case I'll just have to buy a real astronomical CCD camera, something I'm keen to do anyway
The Banding is an issue with the D300 as well. I usually shoot astro at ISO800 and get a great result. The first image shows the Milky Way from The Coal Sack to Scuttum and is a combiation of 3, 5 minute exposures. the Lens was the 11-18mm Tamrom f4.5.
The Second image shows the banding which was taken using my 70-200 f2.8 Nikon Lens.
The last is a 10 Second exposure with my 50mm f1.4 taken at bucketty.
Nah, they don't Greg, not to my knowledge, anyway.
Although, there's ways of removing it. I'm working on a procedure at the moment (whenever I get time) to see if I can remove any banding present in images which are pushed 2-stops (I shoot low ISO images and therefore it's not really apparent). I figure it's a waste of time as I never do night time widefields as the original poster, but, it's always good fun pushing your knowledge of processing.
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Ok thanks for that. I remember the 20D occassionally had some banding issues on some cameras- not all. It even got a name like river of darkness of something.
As I recall it was fixed by a firmware update. I think the point is these cameras are not designed to do what we are using them for but for terrestial imaging so an odd phenomenon like banding could occur.
I'm using break-point ranges in ImagesPlus that the documentation classifies as "high," "aggressive" and "very aggressive." The pics look great apart from the banding.
