S9500 hack for extended exposures?

[Chrisp]

Hi,

I've been advised that I could use my S9500 to get good widefield astro photographs, mounted on an equatorial telescope mount, processing the shots with a program called Deep Sky Stacker www.deepskystacker.free.fr

I'm also advised that there is probably a firmware hack that allows overiding/extending the S9500's maximum 30 second exposures.

Can anyone advise whether such a hack exists and where I might be able to download it from?

I guess I'm talking about a Fuji equivalent of the Canon CHDK hack.

Thank you!
Chris

[davenn]

Hi Chris,

I'm also into astro photography (Imaging). You should be aware that exposures anything longer than ~ 20 - 30 sec will start to introduce significant thermal noise and degrade the image.
So you are not going to gain anything by doing that.
As with the Deep Sky Stacker, you mention above, that method is the best way to go and is what many of us do to overcome that is to do image stacking as part of post processing ie. taking say 10 x 15 second images (that keep our exposures well below the time when thermal noise becomes a problem) and stacking those in Lightroom or Photoshop etc .... it produces results that will often blow away 20 or 30 minute film exposures that we did in the good old days Remember that the digital sensor doesnt suffer from reciprocity failure that film does.

cheers
Dave