Unable to extend the shutter speed beyond 30 sec on Leica CL for astrophotography. Is there a Leica app that could help with bulb mode? Also, can the noise reduction be turned off in Long exposures?

[Piyush Chandra Kamal]

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Hello,

I have recently started learning night sky photography. I took some shots at 20 sec exposure with the Leica CL at f2.8 with the Elamrit-TL f/2.8 18 mm Lens. The individual exposures were fine, but had noise due to high ISO. I haven't tried 30 seconds since it will lead to star trails, and I would need a star-tracker.

Could you please let me know if there is a Leica app that could enable the bulb mode to extend the shutter speed beyond 30 seconds on the Leica CL? There is a 'T' feature in the camera, but I was not able to extend the shutter speed. Could it be possible to do a exposure greater than 30 sec so that I could use a star-tracker?

Also, is there a way to turn Noise reduction off for long exposures?

Thank you.

Piyush

[jaapv]

Welcome. No and no.

[Piyush Chandra Kamal]

Thanks.

[jaapv]

I fear that this camera - like most if not all Leicas- is not very suitable for your purpose because of the hard limit on exposure times.
In any case, turning off LENR is not going to be much help - hot pixels from long exposure will look too much like stars to be able to remove them by any other technique. Actually, the dark frame noise reduction originated in astrophotography. 

[pocholin]

This picture was taken at 8seconds, ISO 12,500 with a Ttartisans 11mm lens at F2.8. I fixed noise post-processing. I think the result is okay coming from the CL.

 

I recently posted other pictures with 30 second exposure...there's a little bit of trailing but not a big deal at screen size resolution, only when you zoom 100%, check out the pictures in here and here

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[beewee]

On 8/25/2021 at 1:49 AM, jaapv said:

I fear that this camera - like most if not all Leicas- is not very suitable for your purpose because of the hard limit on exposure times.

The SL2-S would be the rare exception. It does an amazing job for wide field astro.

The challenge for astrophotography is not long exposure times but clean high ISO (12500+) exposures. Generally speaking, if you want to avoid star trails, then you’ll need to keep exposures under 10s anyway. In order to achieve that, you need to be able to get clean images at very high ISO settings.

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Edited August 27, 2021 by beewee

[beewee]

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There is one other option you can try with the CL but requires much more post processing and probably more equipment such as a star tracker mount, which is exposure stacking.

With exposure stacking, you take multiple shorter exposure images of the same scene and then add/average the pixel values to get a clean bright image that would mimic a single long exposure. The challenge is that you’ll probably need to independently expose the sky and ground with different stacked exposures and then merge them together after stacking them independently and for the sky exposures, you may need a star tracking mount if your exposures are spread over a long period of time. Some of the more advanced astrophotography exposure stacking software can help align the exposures with the sky slowly rotating across different frames so it depends on the software you’re using.

[pocholin]

On 8/27/2021 at 11:26 AM, beewee said:

The SL2-S would be the rare exception. It does an amazing job for wide field astro.

The challenge for astrophotography is not long exposure times but clean high ISO (12500+) exposures. Generally speaking, if you want to avoid star trails, then you’ll need to keep exposures under 10s anyway. In order to achieve that, you need to be able to get clean images at very high ISO settings.

 

Beautiful picture, was that taken with the SL2-S? What ISO?

Edited August 28, 2021 by pocholin

[beewee]

11 hours ago, pocholin said:

Beautiful picture, was that taken with the SL2-S? What ISO?

SL2-S @ ISO 12500 + Sigma 14-24/2.8 DG DN

[pocholin]

9 hours ago, beewee said:

SL2-S @ ISO 12500 + Sigma 14-24/2.8 DG DN

Thanks, very useable at that high ISO! 

I hope the next CL, if there is going to be one, has a backlit sensor and can handle higher ISO like the SL2-S....otherwise, I'll have to upgrade to that camera and just take deal with the extra mass and weight. 

[beewee]

Yeah, I’d be interested in seeing what the next CL would be like, assuming there is one. I had similar challenges shooting astrophotos with the M10 which is partly why I ended up getting the SL2-S.

Edited August 29, 2021 by beewee