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Sony A7 Night sky photography?

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I just got a light weight carbon fibre tripod off Ebay - a Chinese one and it is surprisingly well made and light. It was a great buy. Sometimes I use a Manfrotto aluminum one as it has a handle for adjusting the angle which is handy for aligning the Polarie with the South Celestial Pole.

Greg.
 
Probably mediocre as with any digital camera. These cameras sensors are also sensitive to infrared so they have quite a wide IR and UV block filter. Cameras modified for astrophotography have these filters removed and replaced with a narrower band one that does not cut the hydrogen alpha band of light .

Greg.
 
bwana4swahili said:
I've owned an A7R since Nov. 2013 and used it as a normal camera for the 1st month (for a bit of everything). I then had the camera modded to full spectrum by Life Pixel for both IR and astro/nightscape photography. A few recent images shot while I was in New Mexico:

Mainly astrophotography but a few others:

https://plus.google.com/photos/116260312230579398213/albums/6001937805993991329
Click to expand...
Nice stuff!

I do have a full spectrum camera and would love to try out something similar.

What filters do you use?
 
darkdirtydwarf said:
bwana4swahili said:
I've owned an A7R since Nov. 2013 and used it as a normal camera for the 1st month (for a bit of everything). I then had the camera modded to full spectrum by Life Pixel for both IR and astro/nightscape photography. A few recent images shot while I was in New Mexico:

Mainly astrophotography but a few others:

https://plus.google.com/photos/116260312230579398213/albums/6001937805993991329
Click to expand...
Nice stuff!

I do have a full spectrum camera and would love to try out something similar.

What filters do you use?
Click to expand...
 
erotavlas said:
This was taken with 3 year old Sony Nex 5N using Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 and 180 sec on a Vixen Polarie at ISO 800. (+ Tone curve / levels adjustments but no noise reduction applied.)

Is it acceptable in terms of noise? Would using Sony A7/r improve things? I wonder what it would look like using full frame. I feel at ISO 3200 and 6400 my noise gets worse.

I see a band of color noise at the bottom of the frame when I do long exposure. In another forum other users suggest it is heat.

3ff8c7045fcb416dafbafd06a9cb3ffd.jpg
Click to expand...
Your Milky Way is a nice image! It looks very good at the above size; however, the larger image shows a fair bit of color noise, which could be reduced by taking multiple shots, aligning and stacking them to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

An A7R and/or A7S might do a better job, all depends on your technique. With either of these Sony cameras you could probably shoot the same image at 30 sec & ISO3200-4800 and get about the same result. If you used multi-frame noise reduction on either camera you would see a significant improvement. You would definitely get a cleaner image at 180sec @ ISO800.

I am assuming from the info provided that this is a single image. I would really suggest taking several shots, aligning and stacking them to reduce noise to minimum. You would see a significant improvement with even four images, i.e.: an improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio of 2x. Combining 16 or so images and you wouldn't have ask whether is was "acceptable in terms of noise?"

bwa
 
bwana4swahili said:
darkdirtydwarf said:
bwana4swahili said:
I've owned an A7R since Nov. 2013 and used it as a normal camera for the 1st month (for a bit of everything). I then had the camera modded to full spectrum by Life Pixel for both IR and astro/nightscape photography. A few recent images shot while I was in New Mexico:

Mainly astrophotography but a few others:

https://plus.google.com/photos/116260312230579398213/albums/6001937805993991329
Click to expand...
Nice stuff!

I do have a full spectrum camera and would love to try out something similar.

What filters do you use?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for the feedback. Yes this was a single image. You are right that stacking would improve things. But the only thing is when doing landscape shots or shots where you have a structure or tree in the frame, stacking gets tricky. I tried it for one image and the landscape gets blurred (depending how long it took for the stars to move across the frame) Which was my reason for considering a camera with better high ISO performance (to avoid stacking)
 
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