Taking darks at a convienient time.....

[kirkster501]

Guys, not sure if anyone else is doing this or if it makes sense, but I have a cunning plan...

I nearly always (well, in my very short AP career at any rate) take 180 second exposures. What's to stop me taking a set of darks at a range of temperatures, all three minutes long? So for example, one day when the ambient temp is say 5C I just set up in the garage and fire the darks off.... The next day it might be 8C so I fire off another set, etc. I end up with a sequnce of possibly hundreds of sets of darks of different exposure and temp. I then match the temperature (within a few degrees) to when I took the lights in the field and hey, I save loads of field time! I could take a set at that temperature for some additional exposure lengths, say 3,4,5,10 minutes.

Is this sensible? Have I invented a new idea ;-)

Rgds, Steve

[Steve Ward]

I always set the camera shooting darks as I'm packing up for the night and store them in a clearly marked folder with Temp , Exp + ISO in the title , pretty much guaranteed to match the nights shoot naturally and they don't take long when you're busy elsewhere.

You'd need an extensive library to cover all eventualities and that would be a far more arduous task methinks.

Steve.

[Earl]

As taking darks without set point cooling is not easy, (to get reliable results on subtraction) it might be better to use dither guiding.