XT-30 Bulb mode - Long Exposure processing in session

[jamesc2225]

Hi,  I'm a newbie Astrophotographer and I'm trying to work out how to get the most out of my XT-30.  I'm using it in Bulb mode (non Auto), with a cheap intervalometer to give me 1 min plus exposures.  

When setting up a image capture session on the intervalomter, I'm having to account for the processing time of each long exposure into my shoot.  So for example, if I'm shooting a 59" exposure, I have to then wait whilst the camera "processes" the image, which is also exactly 59 seconds.  If I'm shooting a sequence of frames then this makes a 50 frame sequence last (50 x 59") x 2 (2 hours for a total of 50ish minutes of open shutter.

I wondered if anyone was aware of any buffering or burst mode on the camera, which could avoid the processing time after each long exposure?  Is there any way to give the capture priority whilst the processing is queued up after the sequence is shot?  I'm finding that I'm losing quite a bit of time to processing in my sessions.  Forgive me if I'm just being dumb - as I say I'm new to long exposure photography.

Thanks in advance!

James

[jerryy]

It sounds like you have the camera’s ‘dark frame’ noise reduction turned on. Try turning off all of the various noise reduction options and you should be able to use your intervalometer to shoot back to back frames and then later get the dark frames and bias frames for processing. Just a thought, you may want to set your intervalometer to have a brief pause (say ten or 15 seconds) between frames to let the sensor cool a bit, — this may help reduce those pesky hot pixel problems.

[jamesc2225]

Thanks Jerryy - will certainly give that a crack.  If this solves it will save me a lot of time, I shall report back!

[jerryy]

I probably should have mentioned that this option is in the menu for Image Quality Setting  >> Long Exposure NR with the choice of on or off.

The other types of noise reduction (Sharpness and Noise Reduction -- which are also found in the Image Quality Menu) are applied to jpeg images during the in camera developing. These settings are not supposed to affect raw images. So assuming you are shooting raw images, you can leave these at their current values without any worries.

[jamesc2225]

Hi Jerryy

That was exactly it.  I switched off the Long Exposure NR and it worked perfectly!  Thanks so much for the tip - halved my imaging time!  I'm still processing it but I'll post the results here!

Thanks again!

James