Is this noise on the sensor??

[imagesliveon]

Looked out the window tonight here in the UK and noticed a nice full moon!

Decided to take a snap with my 7D and 400mm Sigma...

When I did some editing in CS6 I noticed what looked like stars around the moon... Is it just noise on the sensor??

Kind Regards

 

[NikonO4K]

Noise, no. Dust on the sensor, probably.

 

[KmH]

Sort of, but it's not dust on the image sensor, which would be much larger, blurred, and dark, making it invisible in the dark parts of the shot.
That is mostly amplifier noise. All the pixels, including the dark ones, have to amplified some amount to produce an image.

How much amplification is applied is what the camera ISO setting is all about.

Amplification is applied even at the lowest ISO setting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_noise

 

[MLeeK]

Can you give us a slice at full size?

 

[zcar21]

why did you shoot at iso 3200?

 

[invisible]

why did you shoot at iso 3200?

My guess is that s/he was shooting handheld with a long lens that wasn't necessarily fast.

 

[LizardKing]

It seems you exaggerated a little bit the sharpening... Maybe that contributed to the noise if you did mask the black sky.
Anyway, good shot for a full moon.

 

[imagesliveon]

why did you shoot at iso 3200?

Thanks guys!

Yes the camera was handheld. I took 18 shots in total with the first ones on a Tripod, however the location where I could position the tripod was standing in the road and there wasn't a suitable break in the traffic to set it up. I ended up holding the camera, Hence my shutter and ISO speeds.

Would I have gotten away with a Lower ISO??

Here's the image totally unedited with exception to a quick crop and change from RAW to JPG.

You guys are free to see if you can get it better looking than I can.

Kind regards

 

[Sw1tchFX]

Noise, no. Dust on the sensor, probably.

Other way around dude.

 

[LizardKing]

There's still some noise in the original image, but it's not even close to what's on the edit.
Anyway, just mask the edits as to only affect the moon and not the sky. And then there's a couple of things you can use to remove the noise in the sky, which in this case is pretty easy since it's all black. Try googleing it

 

[imagesliveon]

Thanks guys!