this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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Well the second pic is also at night with a high iso and long exposure plus it's digital so there's a lot more noise going on.
Speaking in generic terms, film is way more forgiving of over exposure and digital is way more forgiving of under exposure. A fast lens is always king, but once you hit parity on that I would personally take digital for low light any day.
Digital should be the better for either one because both can be normalized to a normal exposure, in which case over should still be more accurate (assuming a static scene). With film, you open the shutter and then allow light to hit the single piece of film, which makes up your full data for that image. Digital could record time data with the light data and essentially keep a record of the full exposure, which can then be averaged and normalized to the length of the exposure.
As long as no pixels get blown out by the exposure, linearly scaling brightness would handle the normalization. Though one of those "take 30 pictures real quick" would also work if you average them together, maybe add a little positional correction if the first frame and last frame are far enough apart that the spacecraft has moved significantly in that time.
Copy that, my knowledge of the specifics of digital vs analog is about exhausted just from what i posted so i appreciate the added information!