Star Field Film Recomendations

[Steaphany]

I would appreciate recommendations on color fine grain film stocks, available in 120 Roll, for wide field astronomical photography.

Thanks in advance.

 

[DREW WILEY]

There are entire websites dedicated to this specific subject. A simple web search on "widefield photography" will get you there. One outfit
sells a vacuum replacement back to fit Pentax 6x7's. But these require 220 film, otherwise the vac draws the backing paper rather than roll
film per se. Nitpicky stuff. But even using regular 120 film, the P67II is a popular widefield camera, along with the 300 EDIF lens, which is
about as good as telephoto lenses get for visual light photography. I'm not into astrophotography myself. But it sure looks fun.

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

Provia 100F or Provia 400X are both excellent though they shift colour with very long (5-7 hour) exposures. If this matters to you, scout about for Fuji's long-gone T64 tungsten film for a bluish look (but its muted colours aren't that popular). Colour shifts are no big deal if your intent is just to have a bit of fun at a campsite by recording the movement of the heavens, meteors, comets, the Milky Way and even the International Space Station while you sleep! If the purple shift of Provia bugs you, go for the alien-green of Velvia 50 or 100. My my own purposes, I use only two films for star trails (in a Canon EOS 1N with intervalometer), Provia 100F or Provia 400X. And never in the Pentax 67 (by way of mention a neat set up is available to trigger the Pentax 67 without the battery to facilitate long exposures)..

 

[markbarendt]

Portra 160

 

[alanrockwood]

This is a bit of a wild suggestion, but what about three cameras, black and white film, and color separation filters? With stars being a few light years or more away parallax errors are not going to be much of an issue.

 

[Athiril]

Ektar has good reciprocity characteristics I found, when I first used it for long exposure landscapes after it got dark. Otherwise Astia would have been the go to for that.

If you're going to stack multiple images/frames, then I'd pick something like Fuji C200 as it has the best resolving power among the colour neg films if you care about that and will be able to get that detail off the film, yes it's grainy too, but that disappears upon stacking.

edit: just read 120, plenty of detail with a sharp lens in 120, any film will do detail wise, so I'd go with Ektar for the fine grain aspect if you afford the low speed, and something like a Kenko LPR Type-II filter to give more separation from background black and fainter objects - this will hold down the sky as black for longer even in light pollution free areas.