Night Sky Shooting / Astrophotography on X-T2 : ETTR? ISO 1600?

MPg1 wrote:

Hello, great discussion thank you all! I'm also moving my first steps with astrophoto. I have a Vixen polarie and this evening I will try to shoot Andromeda with a fuji X-t1 and 300 mm Nikkor lens. In my previous efforts I used ISO 3200 and 25 seconds, shot a lot of images (95) and stacked with Deep Sky Stacker. And lost color, so much that I decided to convert to B/N for the final image - I will include one of the results. Now I learn I probably had overexposed stars, any I did not try any highlight recovery converting from raw to tiff before stacking. I am now debating what iso setting I will use tonight, the site Photons to Photons for the X-T1 shows a fairly flat curve, does this mean thay whatever ISO I choose it will really not matter? I was thinking about using ISO 400 and then I found this thread and I am starting to rethink all over again. Another question: last time I invested a lot of time shooting those 95 frames with the same settings. This time I could go for shorter series of maybe 15 frames and then change settings to experiment, seems a better way to learn and choose better settings next time. What do you think?

Thank you, Marco

M31

That's an impressive lens image of M31.

The core needs shadows/highlights tool in Photoshop to tame the core.

I would use ISO800 on XT2 to take advantage of the drop in read noise at that ISO level.

It will also protect the star colours But if you expose for a long time ISO800 might even be too high. Trial and error will tell you.

Greg.