Hi Everyone,

If I'm interested in doing night photography (mostly of distant scenery)
with exposure times ranging up to 1 minute, I need to know whether a DSLR
like the Nikon D70 with NR turned on will yield a much cleaner image
(dark-noise-wise) than a good point/shoot digital with NR noise reduction)
turned on. Is the difference profound enough to differentiate a great photo
from a terrible one, or is it barely noticeable?

I currently have a P/S digital that is hard to get a precise focus on (even
manually) in really low light, mostly because, when I turn the manual focus
ring until a distant light source is minimized in size, I'm only able to
minimize it down to one LCD display pixel, which ends up being too coarse a
focus when I later view the image on my PC. Or does NR cause loss of
sharpness that makes it LOOK like it's out of focus? My P/S is a Panasonic
FZ/30, which I've been placing into "night scenery mode" for night shots.
In night scenery mode, ISO is fixed at 80, f-ratio is minimized, exposure
times can be up to 8 seconds long, and NR is turned on.

When a grad student in astronomy, I used liquid nitrogen cooled and
thermoelectrically cooled CCD's with a 1.6 meter telescope, and the cooling,
of course, dramatically reduced dark counts for long exposures (1.5 hours,
typically). However, I'm not aware of any affordable, portable "cooled ccd
cameras" that are good for toting around town at night, so I'm assuming that
isn't an option.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts,
Scott Speck