Last December a Japanese rocket brought cargo 249 miles above the Earth to the International Space Station. On that rocket was none other than a Sony Alpha a7S II, which was soon mounted on the outside of Japan's KIBO module to take photos and videos of the mothership, so to speak.
Mounting a camera to a space station isn't like putting a GoPro on your handlebars – the a7S II is enclosed in a specially designed aluminum housing with a radiator to keep it at a comfortable temperature in the vacuum of space. It's mounted on a two-axis gimbal so, unlike prior cameras on the ISS, it's not constantly looking straight down. The camera itself is basically the same as what you could buy off the shelf, and has an FE 28-135 F4 G OSS power zoom lens attached.
Head on over to Sony's website to learn more about why the company's high-sensitivity full-frame camera was chosen and how it all works. You can also find additional 4K videos to enjoy.
I was surprised by the video being at 28mm, but you have to remember ISS is flying pretty low (400 km in this case) to the FoV is just 514 x 343 km. The shutter speed is high too, presumably for sharpness.
No need for video for such a purpose: photos taken regularly would do better, eventhough they would have had to stitch them and make a fake travelling effect.
BadScience As your nickname suggests, you're not precisely right. The Codec used here is no MJpeg or Raw , so it's not like analog video used to be. Due to inter-frame compression, there is a loss in quality compared to 12mpxels photos A7Sii can make. They could have merged photos into a huge panorama that would then be displayed progressively to recreate motion, with better quality.
One can quickly see from the footage the influence of geography and population settlement in Japan. You can see why 70% of Japanese live in the Sanyo-Tokaido corridor.
Nice ad for Sony but resolution C+. You'll see this clip on their ads soon. Any half decent camera will do the same. Sony outbid Nikon and others for the rights and NASA can use the cash. Let's remember the NASA LRO circling the moon at 25 miles up photoshopped the non-existent fake Apollo landers in to keep the gullible Apollo nuts happy. If you believe the blobs are landers remember that amateurs with backyard telescopes got excellent resolution too. DP has shown these. NASA has been and still is scamming the world. It cancelled the manned Mars mission because it "can't protect astronauts from space radiation". Well, what about Apollo? How did they manage it? Using 1960s technology then it was no problem - 6 men to the moon in 3 years. Now with powerful computers NASA is stymied. Space is tough. NASA lied and created a fantasy Apollo story many believe to this day.
Majauskasson: You said: "...Nice ad for Sony but resolution C+...." Check the video settings ( gear icon) at the bottom of the video screen and then reset to 1440 dpi and then watch it again.. I am not a big Sony booster, but this is spectacular footage. Either that or I suggest you have your vision checked, and soon.
Hi, @Majauskasson "amateurs with backyard telescopes got excellent resolution too": If you do the maths, I think you need at least a 75m telescope and I don't think any amateur had a 75m backyard optical telescope. Also, even you had such a big telescope, our earth atmosphere will limit the resolution of your telescope.
Anyway, in those cold war days, you know, people take a lot more risks and basically NASA get a lot more $$ for the program compare to today.
Did they use external recorder so that A7S II can send 10-bit 4K 4:2:2? SLOG3 and ETTR is a must for optimal video quality. Otherwise it is a fail to show A7S II video capabilities.
Canon is still a popular camera brand and millions of people can't be wrong, so why Sony?
Canon is just not very good at video, I guess. Dynamic range, weak codecs, soft image. Canon's lovely skin tones probably don't matter much in spaaaaaace.
What's the point in filming earth in real time this way besides showing the ISS is moving fast, which I knew already. I don't see anything moving on the surface. It might be a still.
You must of missed the part where the camera is housed in a special tempature controlled radiated enclosure. Which the lens has to shoot through. Odds are it isn't made of aspherical glass...
@VictorTrasvina - yes, NASA _used_ (as in past tense) Nikon cameras as Nikon so often loved to tell us in their heyday of the 1960's. Haven't done much since but let Canon blow right by them with Sony nipping at their heels.
Nikon is still the official photographic equipment provider of both NASA and ESA. This module is from JAXA, however, and I'm guessing Sony will now cover their imaging needs, which is in and of itself a big deal.
Conversely, it's easy to look up and watch the ISS pass overhead. There are various apps for iOS and Android that will alert you when it's possible to see it from your location, and unlike most satellites that are dim points of light the ISS is insanely bright.
I photographed it handheld at a 1/100 and high ISO. The picture had quite noticeable shake. It's something of a white blob, but the basic shake is discernable. Kind of like a photo of Venus.
Using a tripod would be hard (for me) as it moves quicky through the frame.
Just curious, They could have used a ND filter and lowered the aperture out of the double digits, to eliminate diffraction at f16. I know they are shooting 60FPS, that's why the shutter speed is at 125th. I'll just have to go with them on the next ride up!
The circle of confusion is comparable to the pixel size. By the time downsampling has been carried out, the innate sharpness of the lens and the accuracy of the downsampling, the aperture at f16 will have a negligible to nil effect. The required filter would potentially have a greater negative effect with an extra surface for flare, not to mention it would have to be a vari-ND which they'd need to set up an extra mechanism to remotely change, again with an increased risk of problems.
At f16 the blurring due to diffraction is about 21um. UHD pixels on FF are about 9.4um. You tend to notice diffraction effects on a Bayer sensor after you've gone past two pixel widths, so f16 is only just beyond that (it's only a gradual thing and the definition of "notice" is user-dependant). Plus that's if you are close enough to see all the resolution and using a display device that will not do a load of extra processing anyway.
It's a Japanese rocket sending supplies to a space station not a human carrying space module landing on the moon. If you search 'photos/ videos taken from space' in Google you'll find various cameras and equipment used by agencies and individual astronauts.
Yes @smhain. I agree. 'they' chose Sony or maybe Sony paid/ partnered with the Japanese Space Agency. I have no problem with Sony I think it's a great choice. What I am saying is that there are many if not hundreds of imaging devices out there (try Telescopes and expedition modules) that use anything from bespoke to P&S cameras.
Yes, but I didn't quite understand how close they are, in most pictures they use really wider angles! This time they declared that it's a 28 mm, a focal length that i use and know, and despite the angle of view being wide, it amazed me how a small portion of earth it frames! And of consequence the feeling of speed, that is enhanced when moving close to something!
Nice images. Hate hate hate the music . . . adds nothing but an artificial sense of dread and doom, and really detracts from the impact of the actual photography.
Have you much experience with Japanese musical tastes? This was far better than average or "normal". Find the Nikon 100 anniversary video with Mrs. Green Apple for normal, and the be grateful for this music.
It's quite the opposite, you can't give away heat trough air (because there isn't obviously), but only in the form of radiation. If I correctly remember the ratio of heat transfer trough air/radiation this should mean that you have only roughly 10% of the cooling capability we have here with air. So in my opinion they put a cold radiator to avoid overheating. Otherwise they may be not in the space enough, so there could still be air, really cold because of the low pressure, and the radiator could be hot. I hope they did their math better than me!
Dealing with accumulated radiant energy from the sun is one of the great engineering problems of space travel anywhere inside Mars orbit distance from the sun.
With no atmosphere to help even out temperature extremes, temperature management is a big problem in both directions. Spacecraft must be built to withstand both very cold and very hot temperatures, often at the same time (the sides that do and don't face the sun), and of course deal with thermal cycling stresses as the super-hot and super-cold areas move around the spacecraft.
On Earth we can also count on heat rising away from an object, but in space there is no convection because of no atmosphere and no gravity, so the heat doesn't just go away on its own! Unless you built in a good radiator that can make up for the lack of convection.
Right you are. And yet they had this problem solved with Apollo in 1969. The capsule exposed to full sunlight on one side (+250C) shadow side (-250C). But Apollo had not problems in space or on the moon. What geniuses they were back then. What gullible idiots we are today to keep believing NASA could pull that off. It's a big joke on us.
You know what I mean BadScience. OK, I'll restate it accurately: A spacecraft does not possess enough mass to create enough gravitational force to retain enough atmosphere to allow convection to pull heat away from the surface of a spacecraft the way a planet does.
Satisfied?
(I sometimes get pedantic too, so I understand where you're coming from)
or you could have just said the craft was in a soft vacuum...
I didn't make the point to be pedantic (which is about minor details) - a great many people think that gravity somehow switches 'off' at some vague altitude above the surface of the earth. This is not a minor detail!
I can see how it would be confusing to some. for example the ISS is held in orbit by Earth gravity, yet the astronauts in the station are weightless, so to a layman it appears there is no gravity in there. Even though they are subject to gravity from the Earth, the Sun, and every other body in the Solar System, even the galaxy; it's just a matter of relative influences.
Footage look great eapecially in that kind of light availability. That 12mp chip is a gem that I wish all companies imitate it! A D850C, 5DC, 6DC, why not. Market is huge downthere and liftting Sony/panny camera devisiobs on their feets. Not a small one to completely ignore.
The 12MP chip is amazing, but not the best thing out there anymore. The great part of it was low light performance as well as FF 4k. The 42mp sensor does those two similarly well these days.
@Dr Blackjack: The A7rII is good, but when it comes to true low light performance, even the A7s will beat it. And that when taking pictures. For video it is even worse, because the better quality video mode on the A7rII uses a Super35/APS-C size crop area of the sensor. Alone that will render its performance less than the A7s(II). The other point is the higher sensitivity of the pixels of the A7s(II), which offers a better SNR per pixel, which in turn means you have cleaner shadows and more post-processing capabilities with the A7s(II) towards higher ISOs. Ignoring that fact is like saying my 5D3 gives the same result as the D810 at base ISO using the studio scene tool, despite the fact that everyone knows what the D810 is capable of compared to the 5D3. Makes you wonder if that normal studio scene tool is the right "measurement tool" for that purpose ...
I need the best low-light camera in a small format factor. You can bet on it that I got my hands on an A7rII as soon as possible to compare it with my A7s. I still own the A7s.
If you count ISO 3200 or maybe 6400 as low-light, then by all means, get the A7rII. Beyond that, if you prefer easier post-processing, nicer colors and tonalities, get the A7s(II). And no, rescaling will not help there, infact many of the sites and videos telling you that display pictures showing the deficiencies of the A7rII in that area - to the knowing eye, which many of these reviewers obviously not posess.
Also, if that were true what you are saying, the difference in video should be 1 stop at most ("sensor" area). But it is more ... strange, uh?
Probably it was not a choice by sony, it may simply have been chosen because it has a good sensor sensibility, a good 4k video, and because of the weight. Did you know that anything we throw to space roughly costs its weight in gold as far as the cost of the energy to put it into orbit is concerned? Shaving off some grams could have been helpful!
I tested the lens in an A7RII when it first came out. The notion that they probably needed zooming remotely must be the correct answer for not using much lighter primes.
Oh that lens is great, smooth iris, very smooth focus ring, all geared, power zoom, no breathing, just a lovely documentary lens. But 28mm was a bad start at s35/aps-c of the A7RII so better on an A7s/II. For that Sony made another nearly identical lens starting at 18mm. And Canon made the lustfull 18-80mm f/4 CN-E.
@Ebrahim That's all very well, Ebrahim, but lets get to the real issue: how come you can exceed the 1000 character limit in your posts? :) Were you a mod?
Haha. The mods actually did do their job. They sent me a message stating that they know there are ways to get around the limit (I don't know thoses ways, all I know is I am using Google Chrome, old Chinese Huawei, old Android 4.2.2). Maybe I need to upgrade!
Is there an easy way to count charachter's because I want to respect that limit? Now I just eyeball it versus other posts
His previous comment is 489 characters long. No idea what you're talking about. Here is his comment: "I tested the lens in an A7RII when it first came out. The notion that they probably needed zooming remotely must be the correct answer for not using much lighter primes.
Oh that lens is great, smooth iris, very smooth focus ring, all geared, power zoom, no breathing, just a lovely documentary lens. But 28mm was a bad start at s35/aps-c of the A7RII so better on an A7s/II. For that Sony made another nearly identical lens starting at 18mm. And Canon made the lustfull 18-80mm f/4 CN-E." Here is your comment: "@Ebrahim That's all very well, Ebrahim, but lets get to the real issue: how come you can exceed the 1000 character limit in your posts? :) Were you a mod?" And still 200 chars to go :)
@Achiron 'His previous comment is 489 characters long. No idea what you're talking about.'
Yes, but still you commented. Did you notice how Ebrahim appeared to understand what I was talking about? Didn't you think that perhaps you were missing some information rather than neither of us can count? :)
I don't want to come off rude so just the fact: Achiron, we are speaking about previous 2000+ charachter posts I made before. There is no limit if I wanted to ruin the section with 10K charachers comment I could. Odd.
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