Can I Astrophotography? Sony NEX-C3

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DualFever

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Hello

I currently own a Sony NEX-C3 camera and would like to take a few photos of the night sky.

I did own the kodak z981 and took this photo of the moon:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cancbsrw3zpgdmk/moon1.png

moon1.png


The Kodak did have a 26x zoom on it.

I would like to take similar photos, with higher or similar quality with the NEX-C3, is this possible? what lens would i need?

Thanks for any help.

-Dual
 
It's possible. To get the same sort of magnification you're going to need a 500mm lens though. Only way that'll realistically be manageable on a Nex is with a mirror lens, of which there are plenty of 500mm ones around for not a lot of money.
 
With a tripod, a 200mm lens, timed shutter release, manual mode and some patience experimenting with settings (you'll want a relatively fast shutter speed so the movement of the moon across the sky doesn't become an issue) you should be able to take some cracking moon shots with that camera.
The moon will be fairly small in the frame but the 16 megapixels will allow you to crop it in significantly without losing any perceivable quality.

For astrophotography beyond the moon, starscapes are about your limit with just a camera and tripod. Those planet or deep sky photographs you see require some significant kit, skill and patience.
 
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I took this with a 200mm lens and a 10mp camera (a horrible Nikon D3000). Not that great but should give you an idea of what's possible with limited equipment.

4920963604_0dc1cc500a_z.jpg
 
The moon is lit by the sun, so you're looking at exposure setting relatively similar to shooting on a sunny day.. so start around 1/125th @ f16 ISO100 or any reciprocal of that. As you probably want to squeeze the last drop of sharpness from the lens, I'd shoot around f5.6 so therefore... start at 1/1000th @ f5.6 ISO100 and fine tune from there.

Use a tripod... focus manually if you have live view. Go in live view.... zoom in on the display as far as you can go and focus manually... ensure AF is actually switched off)

If you have mirror lock up.. use it.
 
For proper astro photography, yes you'll need e telescope, and more importantly, an equatorial mount that can track the rotation of the earth.... it starts getting expensive. Without such a mount, you're pretty much limited to fairly short shutter speeds.... around 20 seconds for wide shots with wide angle lenses, and as little as 1 second with a 200mm lens. Longer lenses will be down to less than half a second.

Shot of the moon though... you can get good stuff from a 300mm lens on a crop sensor camera.
 
I did end up getting some equipment for my NEX-C3K.
A samyang 500m mirror lens
and a 2x converter, with an adapter to the NEX.
I think I need something extra to fix the 2x Converter to my tripod instead of the camera itself, not sure if the camera can take all that weight!
Not expensive stuff it seems to be doing the trick. With a little more playing around and some post processing I will probably be able to get better photos. This is what I got so far, first time with it yesterday, too high an ISO so lots of noise @ 6400.

Here's our moon, I also managed to get Jupiter and its moons.

View attachment 7511 View attachment 7512 View attachment 7513 View attachment 7514
 
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