First test of the Skywatcher Allview

I recently purchased the Skywatcher Allview for automatic Panorama shooting. After doing some minor tests with the software at home, I wanted to try it out in the “field”. The Cuxhaven Harbor location in the evening was a nice place for 2 different sessions having enough details and also water with waves which always get stitching software to struggle as blue skies do.

I used my Nikon D2x and the Micro Nikkor 105 AF-D for this. Manual focus was set with a 6.3 aperture. The tripod is more or less fix mounted to the Skywatcher so nothing else needed.

 

To avoid shakes I programmed the Skywatcher for 2 seconds wait after positioning and then using a 1 second delay for each shot. The whole session for the first picture took less than 5 minutes to shoot and approximately 5 minutes to setup the software. That’s pretty quick.

 

First panorama

The first panorama I did was from the quay towards the Steubenhöft area around 160° picture with 2 rows resulting in 36 images. The result is a 251 Megapixel image that is pretty good stitched together with expected stitching problems in the waves on the water.

 

Full size picture can be downloaded in JPEG format here. Be careful, it’s around 115 Megabytes and also, it’s not copyright free 🙂 but can be downloaded for personal use.

 

100% crops

Some 100% crops from the picture out of Lightroom show some good quality in the single picture but also some problems of the Autopano Pro software used to stitch the Panorama (Lightroom 6.1 was not able to stitch properly, it mixed up the pictures resulting more in modern art than what I wanted to get out). The crops have been resized to 1200 pixel to allow easy viewing on smaller screens therefore not showing the true result when pixel-peeping directly in Lightroom.

 

First crop is pretty good with only minor flaws in the water.

 

Second crop shows problems as mentioned in the water bottom left.

 

Third crop shows the good results when using a panorama software to have lot of details even on large areas.

 

Nothing to complain in the fourth crop.

 

A short iPhone movie while shooting showing the movement between 3 pictures.

 

Second panorama

Another Panorama was taken from the Alte Liebe. Because the whole decking is made of wood and there were some visitors on the decking, some pictures got slightly blurred. But still good for testing.

With 206 Megapixel I was able to upload this picture to my SmugMug while the first one exceeded the maximum allowed size of 250 Megapixel. Some images were cropped out at the left and right, so not truly having 54 shots used in this 3 row panorama. Although Lightroom was able to stitch it and having a better result on the exposure alignment, the colors and sharpness of the good areas in the picture weren’t as good as the version I got from Autopano Pro using TIF as a stitched picture format.

 

100% crops

Some 100% crops of the above image. The crops have been resized to 1200 pixel to allow easy viewing on smaller screens therefore not showing the true result when pixel-peeping directly in Lightroom.

 

Compared with the first crop of the Steubenhöft, the results are similar.

 

Pretty good details in the back at the old water reservoir tower and the cranes while the blurred writing on the sign seems to be a result of the wooden decking when people were moving.

 

Very nice sharpness from far away. No complains here.

 

The small kiosk in front looks strange. Colors were more purple instead of blue (not on the original DNG). The house in the back is ok though, not great but it works.

 

Quick conclusion

All in all I am pretty satisfied with the Skywatcher for shooting. The built in software is good enough for some quick shootings and parameters can directly be added through the cable device. No need to run this via a laptop or phone which might look better and more professional but does not produce any better results.

The known problems of this mount are:

• it’s heavy, so one needs to plan properly where to use it
• the camera mount with the Vixen-style dovetail is a cheap version of a panoramic adapter not very stable and comfortable (need to see whether this can be easily replaced by RRS or similar rails and clamps)
• the tripod is more or less fixed to the mount although not too bad but not very comfortable when carrying around
• the batteries for running the mount suck but there’s a external rechargeable power unit available that might help on that side while adding another item to carry around