Widefield and star trails - raw or jpeg?

[Ags]

Is it necessary to shoot in RAW when shooting widefield and star trails? I find that star trails are high contrast so there is no need to shoot in RAW, while my backyard widefields are so bedevilled by LP gradients that milky way and other fuzz is uncapturable, so once more RAW is not needed to capture 16-bit colors.

The fastest I can shoot is F3.5 so I'm not going to capture very faint details in widefield until I upgrade my lenses.

The reason I'm asking is that I currently shoot everything in RAW but I might need to buy an extra memory card for my Nepal expedition unless I can make the change to JPEG.

[Photosbykev]

At some point you will regret shooting in jpg, normally after capturing that once in a lifetime image. Raw gives you the ability to stretch an image much further and capture significantly more detail.

Raw is like a film negative and Jpg like a print. You can always go back to a raw file as your processing skills improve and you will pull out more detail, with a jpg you are severly handicapped before you even start.

Memory cards are pretty cheap and very light and compact.

The last major star trail I shot had over 2000 raw images in the sequence, it took a long time to process but was worth every minute

[Psychobilly]

I have now got 96GB of cards for the 7D a mix of capacities and speeds..

For astro and landscape you dont need the latest and greatest hispeed cards.. The only caveat being if you might do a bit if video...

For a trip like yours I would avoid ebay bargains...

In the past I ended up with a couple of counterfeit sandisk cards which failed after a few weeks...

Peter...

[Photosbykev]

I agree with pete do not buy cheap cards from eBay. 90% of them are fake and very poor quality. It isn't just the loss of pictures to worry about it is possible for a bad memory card to permanently damage your camera as well.

Buy Sandisk, Lexar or Kingston from a reliable source

[rfdesigner]

I always try and shoot in RAW regardless, even if it's only shots of the kids or mucking abut shots... My wife uses jpeg and I picked up the camera one day to play with and got one of my best ever shots of my youngest.. IN JPEG!! .. so I can't do very much with it.

I was playing with OAGing the night before last and am currently limited to 30s so I got 100 images in one session, therefore part of my preparation is to download all the camera images then format the card.

Remember JPEG is a four letter word, like 'only' and 'just'.

Derek

[Ags]

Thanks for the advice - I was worried that RAW was overkill. I will pick up another memory card tomorrow.

[Psychobilly]

For startrails from home I use jpegs... If I was doing a "Kev" and travelling to get a bit more foreground interest I would shoot raws as well...

Even when shooting raws I normally let the camera write a small jpeg as well handy for quick reference...

Peter...

[Photosbykev]

doing a "Kev" is kinda worrying lol

[Psychobilly]