Orion and friends over a chimney

[discardedastro]

I've never done any widefield before but I had a Nikon Z6 to hand last night and it was beautifully clear, so I took ~25 untracked 5 second exposures looking back over my house. f/4, 24mm (using Nikkor's Z6 24-70mm FX Z-mount lens)

The image came out better than I'd hoped, though in getting rid of the worst of the skyglow I also lost some of the brightness of the milky way. I'm still quite happy with how it came out.

Processed with PixInsight - calibrated with dark and bias, debayered, aligned, integrated and CFA drizzled at 1x scale, DBE, BN, PCC, MLT denoise, TGVDenoised, histogrammed, colour sat and curves to finish.

Bonus - non-colour-corrected drizzled integrated master:

Edited December 2, 2019 by discardedastro

[davew]

That's worked rather well for a first attempt. We'll be seeing more I hope.

I now almost exclusively use the Z6 for my widefield static shots and really like it. By far the easiest camera I've ever used as everything I want can be operated one handed and custom buttons set up just so.

If you want another go then the 24mm end of the lens could be used for a bit longer. I've done 15 seconds at 24mm and it's ok as long as you don't view the image at 200% :)

Sequator is an app just made for this stuff as you can then stack the sky to get a lovely smooth noise free image and the foreground doesn't go blurred. Windows only though.

Dave

 

[discardedastro]

On 03/12/2019 at 11:04, davew said:

That's worked rather well for a first attempt. We'll be seeing more I hope.

I now almost exclusively use the Z6 for my widefield static shots and really like it. By far the easiest camera I've ever used as everything I want can be operated one handed and custom buttons set up just so.

If you want another go then the 24mm end of the lens could be used for a bit longer. I've done 15 seconds at 24mm and it's ok as long as you don't view the image at 200%

Sequator is an app just made for this stuff as you can then stack the sky to get a lovely smooth noise free image and the foreground doesn't go blurred. Windows only though.

Dave

 

Sadly the Z6 is work's, so I don't have it set up just so - it's a bit of faff to get it worked into AP mode, but fine once it's there. This was on the 24mm end - I tried 30s but had definite blurring, 5s was alright but I should've gone for 800 ISO rather than 320 as I understand that's the max native gain of the sensor. It's a heck of a lot less noisy than my Nikon D1x, but no huge surprise there, with 18 years between them! That the lenses all still work is something of an engineering marvel.

Once the prices come down a bit I'll definitely be nabbing one myself - the only complaint I have is that the tripod plate I have is too big to let the FTZ adaptor move past it, and so you constantly have to swap the plate between FTZ adaptor and Z6 base if swapping between F and Z mount lenses (which, inevitably, I do).

I'll take a look at Sequator - feels like there should be a nicer way to do this in PixInsight...