D 800E settings for star/night photography

I will be in Monument Valley in late November and plan to do some night photography with my Nikon D 800E.  I am primarily interested in Milky Way type shots, and not star trails.  I have been reading articles I have found on line about what equipment I will need and techniques I need to use.  

I am confused about the different opinions I have found about two camera settings: High ISO Noise Reduction and Long Exposure Noise Reduction. Some say to set these two settings to Off (LENR) or Norm or Off.(HighISONR).  Others say to set them to ON (LENR.) 

If my exposure times might be 30 seconds, what do you recommend I set for LENR and High ISO NR? 

I may be renting a Nikon 24mm f 1.4G lens or the Zeiss 25mm f2 for this trip.  If I do not do that I will probably use my old 20mm f 2.8 AF D Nikon lens or my 24-70mm f2.8 AFS Nikon zoom.

Any other advice will be appreciated. . 


Joe Smith

With 30 second exposures leave it off. There is little to no long exposure noise (hot pixels) added at that exposure time. Even as much as 2 minutes on a star tracker, I leave it off. Above that, you have to weigh the downtime between shots against the hot pixels you will be recording.

Thanks E. J. That might be why somw were recommending to leave LENR off.

Joe

If you are doing some shots without FG you can stack multiple 30 second exposures and you take your own dark frames and subtract them later. I have used deep sky stacker to do this and it allows you to subtract darks and also use bias frames and use flat fields to correct for vignetting. If you are using FG objects stacking won't work so well unless you do composites as the sky moves relative to the FG. This shot was taken that way:

http://www.naturescapes.net/forums/view ... y#p2042076

You should be able to do 2-3 stops better with your equipment. The main reason to leave it off is to avoid waiting between exposures. Renting the equipment for extra lens speed should help a lot, getting sharp stars in the corners is a hard task for a lens.

Keep your lenses somewhere warm when they are not on camera, if you get dew that will help stop them fogging. You should take the dark frames on the night if you use them, same exposure length as you are using and the camera should be at the same temperature. Flat fields you can take an image of an evenly illuminated white card or even a completely clear sky. Deep sky stacker is freeware.

As an aside, if you do have lenses with a lot of coma (streaky stars in the corners) you can shoot in 1.2x mode which still gives you 25 megapixels but doesn't use the corners or edges of the lens.

Hello Joe,

I agree with the above, keep High ISO Noise Reduction and Long Exposure Noise Reduction off.  Your best settings for ISO will be about ISO 800 to ISO 1600.  Remember ISO does not change sensitivity.  Exposure time and lens aperture control the amount of light collected.  You can boost signal in post processing while maintaining star colors using the methods described in my article here:
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/nig ... rocessing/

Regarding exposure times, 30 seconds with a 24 mm lens will show trailing if imaging anywhere near the celestial equator.  About 10 seconds with a sharp lens on the D800 would be about the limit to maintain round stars.  You could always take several 10-second exposures and align and average them together.

A great night photo lens is the sigma 35 f/1.4 art lens.   Example here:
http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/ga ... 0-c1s.html
It has quite sharp stars right to the corners of a full frame camera, even wide open at f/1.4.

There is also no need to do dark frames and subtract them.  The D800 has on sensor dark frame suppression.

Roger

Thanks to all of you for the very helpful answers, comments and additional information. Roger your articles were just what I needed to read and they were so informative. I am still thinking through your comments about ISO settings. That took me by surprise. And Chris, thanks about the foreground comments and other options. I am going to have some fun while in Arizona. 

Joe