2 replies to this topic

[james7ca]

Taken early Thursday morning with an unmodified and unfiltered Nikon Z30 and an Askar FMA180 scope (40mm aperture, f/4.5). This is just 64 minutes of total integration time from a Bortle 7 light pollution zone and I hope to get a lot more time on this subject over the coming months (weather permitting). Image processing with PixInsight and Photoshop 2025.

 

You can click the preview to see the CN-hosted image at 1600 x 1200 pixels (a 60% size reduction and crop from the full APS-C frame). I probably could have gotten a little more from this but Nikon's colored concentric rings issue made the processing more difficult than it should have been. This sequence had both darks and flats and consisted of 256 dithered subs that were each exposed for 15 seconds.

Attached Thumbnails

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Edited by james7ca, 03 November 2024 - 07:25 AM.

[EPinNC]

That's a great image!  A good exposure combination -- a lot of short subs to keep those stars from overwhelming everything else.  Nice color balance too.  I like it a lot!

[james7ca]

EPinNC, thanks for the comments and similarly to everyone else for the likes.

 

I have some 2s exposures that I could add to help with the core brightness of the stars but the 15s shots weren't fully saturated except for a few pixels in the very center of the brightest stars. I'm trying to gather more subs on the Pleiades but I'm finding that even two times the total integration time doesn't help that much given my light pollution and the concentric ring artifacts that come with the Nikon Z30. I normally consider a 2X increase in integration time to represent a just noticeable difference, so maybe this isn't that different from some of my other work. However, if I have to stack over one thousand APS-C sized subs to get something notably better then I may need a faster computer with more memory.

 

I'm currently using an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of memory but I am considering one of the new M4 Pro Mac minis with 64GB of RAM. However, the cost of a system like that is nearly the same as a Mac Studio with a potentially more powerful processor, but the latter won't be updated to an M4 for another four to six months and there could be a price increase when that happens (that didn't happen with the M4 iMac and Mac mini but pricing could be different with the Mac Studio and Mac Pro). However, right now the M4 Pro Mac mini is probably faster than the current M2 Max Studio.