EOS Ra: A great Full Frame Astrophotography mirrorless camera...

AstroDan wrote:

Thanks for the nice review.

The camera seems to be fitting in well for your style. I'm not noticing the hydrogen alpha response as strongly as I expected in your wide-field shots, but I can confirm from my own copy that it is good.

Cheers,

Dan

Hey Dan, I'm going to try to expose with a more accurate Custom White Balance setting for both filtered and unfiltered shots the next time I use the Ra. I'm about to take some calibration shots outside with a grey card at midday.
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Do you have any suggestions or observations for others who will no doubt stumble over this thread? You ought to put in a review if you have the time because I wasn't able to find out a great deal about this camera beyond 8 or 9 videos online and a couple of webpages. Some of those were endorsement videos by sellers and reviewers and some of the material was put together by people with fairly limited astro experience. I've been shooting Astro since around 2011 but became more enthusiastic about it in 2013. I used to work in VFX and was tasked with creating the Milky Way for several major motion pictures and there wasn't enough material to work with back in the mid 2000s. I had to reach out to NASA to obtain the assets needed to complete the shots and then recreated the entire backgrounds by hand using digital painting methods. Astro has come a long way since then.
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I haven't bothered to stack any frames because I'm not tracking with this camera yet. The saturation from the Ha nebulas in our Milky Way tend to show moderately subdued colors with my EOS 6D - which is a favorite for many others for astro work. I recently took some images with the EOS M6 using the EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens and was particularly interested in the increase of color sensitivity to the Carina nebula... although I did have to bump up the saturation levels when editing that shot. I really liked using the EOS 6D for this sort of photography although it did require quire a bit of effort and time to manipulate the data into a nicer final image. This was made more complicated with individual stills and no EQ mount to work with. I'll need to try to spend a bit more time nailing the colors with a more suitable WB. Auto WB and Daylight WB didn't quite seem ideal. The use of the NiSi Filter tends to be more practical when shooting a landscape or architecture... otherwise it's hard to work with the images from that particular light pollution filter and purists will hate me for posting a few of those images with heavy violet/magenta hues.
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I just ran a comparison of some prior shots of the Galactic Core I took a few years ago and I really think that the EF 24mm f/1.4L lens is projecting a wider FOV onto the EOS Ra sensor (compared to the FOV projected onto the 6D sensor), revealing more coma in the corners and vignetting hard as a result. I'll have to test this further by digging out the original files and overlapping them to see if the Ra offers a wider perspective with this same lens. Perhaps someone has done this already?
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Have you taken any wide FOV images with your own EOS Ra? I know you did some deep space shots of Orion in one of the threads here. I'm wondering if a more suitable WB might enhance the visibility of the Ha regions further. I can see a hint of it but then again, I would have preferred to use a longer exposure than 20-25 seconds and a smaller aperture would help cut back on coma etc. I'll figure it out - although we're heading into winter and that's not going to be pleasant out there!. I'm definitely getting more color intensity and smoother results than from other cameras and methods.
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I haven't spent any time editing those shots from the Ra of the Milky Way. I just posted them with or without a crop to get rid of the vignetting. I might need to get onto that tomorrow to see what details and color can be teased out of the JPEGs I took. Will definitely get some RAW images when I get closer to taking tracked and stacked shots from this camera. Just waiting for a new base plate. Also keen to use the EF 135mm f/2L lens on the EOS Ra. I also shot some video of the Live LCD with my iPhone and it still amazes me how visible the Milky Way is when I view the footage. My wife is a wildlife photographer and she was more than surprised to see it. Next time I'll bring a second tripod and/or an EQ mount. As I mentioned before, the Galactic Core was rising up from the horizon when I took these shots with the Ra. There was also a mixture of light fog and light from the city to contend with in that direction at the time. I'll try to time my next session (and next location) more carefully.