kiraclicks
New member
I would like to talk about Astrophotography esp Z8 users. Pinpointing the stars with magnification after infinity has been achieved ..
Astrophotography with the Z8
- Thread starter kiraclicks
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GregT943
Well-known member
Alright, so what is your question? I also assume you are referring to milky way landscape photography and not DSO photography?
TurtleCat
Well-known member
Generally speaking, what you need are two things potentially: a bahtinov mask to help you with pinpoint focus and either a fast enough shutter speed to avoid star trails or a tracking mount to give you longer shutter speeds. Then composite your landscape.
Yup, the Z8 is a great camera for wide field astro work. In terms of critical focus, I like to use the zoom preview feature and zoom in on the brightest celestial object in the night sky. That's often a planet but sometimes the brightest star I can find. You can use Starlight View mode or you can temporarily bump the ISO sky high to see the star or planet brightly enough to focus. I'll do that either in full manual focus or when using back button focusing and remember not to touch that back button which basically leaves things in manual focusing mode.
You can do this with many lenses but ideally a wide to ultra wide angle lens that's fast in terms of maximum aperture. I prefer prime lenses as zooming in the dark is just one more thing to think about and prefer old school manual focus lenses as I can pre-focus once, add some gaffers tape to keep the focus from moving and not worry about focus for the rest of the session. I really like a Rokinon/Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens that I often use for that kind of work. AF lenses and zoom lenses can certainly work but I like the simplicity and great image quality out of that relatively inexpensive lens I keep just for wide field astro work.
Of course these are shot in full manual exposure mode with manually set ISO and I try to keep the shutter speed no longer than a 300 rule (300 over focal length = maximum shutter speed) unless I'm using a tracking mount. So for the 14mm lens I'll try to keep the shutter speed no longer than 20 seconds or so to minimize star streaking unless of course I'm going for star trails and then I'll generally use the internal or an external intervalometer to shoot 30 second to several minute exposures back to back.
TurtleCat
Well-known member
Depending on who you talk to and your tolerance for minor star streaking you can guesstimate your longest shutter speed on a still/nontracking mount at 500/focal length on the long end and 400/focal length on the conservative end. Obviously higher ISO is needed to boost the effect.
Given the horrible light pollution everywhere you’ll likely have light gradients to deal with. One free tool that can help is Graxpert. You could also use a tri-band or quad-band filter which will better isolate the good stuff from the bad stuff but that will be pricey and some color loss.
But please, nobody make the Milky Way blue! It isn’t blue!
Given the horrible light pollution everywhere you’ll likely have light gradients to deal with. One free tool that can help is Graxpert. You could also use a tri-band or quad-band filter which will better isolate the good stuff from the bad stuff but that will be pricey and some color loss.
But please, nobody make the Milky Way blue! It isn’t blue!