Message #21521

[brianb]

I think long exposures like this will show noise, infact photos of some dark gray  clouds when taken to 50% even show noise

Hmmm ... setting "long exposure noise reduction" can make a significant difference ... but the fact remains that you've got to capture lots & lots of photons to reduce thermal noise. Noise reduction software can tidy things up but at the expense of fine detail in areas of flat tone, and some artifacts in high contrast areas of the image.