Anybody using MFT bodies for astrophotography?

Max Iso 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?

If you follow the link above to my image, the EXIF is there. That image was 1/50 sec at ISO 100 at f/6.5. You can calculate how that exposure corresponds to your example.

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?

It would work, yes. You could do a test series comparing noise versus iso versus number of frames stacked.

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.

One important difference is that people doing video stacking shoot thousands of frames and the stacking software then automatically selects the steadiest few hundred frames. Your process will be more tedious but less efficient.

I think you should look a bit deeper into your camera's video resolution and video crop factor, then figure out what's the most efficient route to the image you want. No point in using 16 mp for example if the Moon only covers the central 20% of your frame. Time to spend some time with a pocket calculator and figure things out in detail, I'd say.