Anybody using MFT bodies for astrophotography?

Max Iso wrote:

Mark9473 wrote:

Also, you have to choose how deep you want to jump into astrophotography. Particularly on the Moon, with an 80/600 or 90/500 you can just take a single image with the scope mounted on a heavy duty photo tripod. The shutter speed with these fast scopes will be fast enough to compensate for the Earth's rotation, so you wouldn't need a tracking mount.

If you want significantly better image scale, by using a barlow for example, you're quickly looking at a tracking mount and a lot more effort in image processing.

Yes this was on my mind. What if i take the frame stacking approach? If lets say im using a 100/500 with a 2x barlow (or a 100/1000mm which is F10, same thing in FOV and arc secs all things equal), at F10 i may have to bump up the ISO to get that SS fast enough to counter the rotation. Just a guess but lets say F10, ISO 1600 at 1/200 sec?

Well couldn't i stack images to just bring that noise back down?

One thing i love about using a GX7 is it's full E shutter, so there is no vibration and with E shutter it can shoot at 10fps full rez. I may have to nudge the FOV along every now and then and i will end up cropping out a bit of the edges when aligning, but wouldn't that work?

Yes. But I think Mark was hinting at the fact that your subject will quickly leave your frame. Not only that. The Moon not only changes position on the sky, it also rotates a bit. So even as you correct the framing from time to time, the first frame in the series will be rotated compared to the last frame in the series. Some stacking software can account for that effect, but even the most primitive tracking mount will make your life significantly easier. At shorter focal lengths, like the 750mm I was using, it's not as big of a deal, I guess (after all, I managed without any tracking for quite a long time). Especially if you can do 10fps e-shutter. That will allow you to gather a decent amount of material in a short period of time.

But as Mark wrote, the longer FL you use, the more pressing the need for a tracking mount.

I figure i could use as fast a SS/ISO as needed to really freeze the moon sharp and stack as needed for noise. The key IMO is the lack of vibration and fast FPS, it really opens doors for this kind of shooting, similar to how people stack video frames. Only this is full size 16mp frames at 10fps on a MFT size sensor.

Actually, stacking full res images is much more hassle than stacking from video

It would probably take less time to create a mosaic using that ETC video mode than from full res images.

But you can do it either way.