640x420 JPEGs in Planetary. Really?

[jcal74]

I'm using my Nikon D610 and when I use the Planetary feature in Backyard Nikon the resolution of the images is 640x420. 

This doesn't seem right for a camera that can take photos at 6016x4016

Am I doing something wrong? I don't see any settings to be able to increase the resolution.

Anyone know why or how to change this.?

[astroman133]

The camera downsamples the LiveView images to fit on the LCD screen. BYN grabs the LiveView frames and assembles them into the Planetary video. Using 5X zoom gives an image that is close to the full resolution of the sensor, but with the reduced size of the zoom box.

This behavior is a limitation of the camera and the Nikon SDK, not BYN.

[s3igell]

4 hours ago, jcal74 said:

...the resolution of the images is 640x420. This doesn't seem right for a camera that can take photos at 6016x4016...

Unless you are imaging the Moon, and that with some rather serious Focal Length, all you would capture at 6Kx4K is a Whole Lot of Black Pixels...

For any of the Planets, 640x420 is still going to harvest you a lot of Black...

The more critical element is that Planetary Imaging Mode reduces the amount of Pixels being Interpolated into each Pixel in the Output.

Even at the D610's FullHD Capture, the Horizontal Interpolation would be 3.13:1 and Vertical would be 3.72:1 - that will lose a lot of Per-Pixel Detail...