If I was to...........

Mark Johnson

Mark Johnson

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If I was to buy a full frame camera to attach to my Astro telescope.............

Don't need a lens

Don't wanna pay big bucks

An old 2nd hand jobbie would do.

Seen Ebay ads for a Canon 1D

Just want a better sensor for Astro type detail

Currently using Olympus EM1. Great camera for general work, but not impressed with Astro detail.

Pie in the sky (ha ha) perhaps

any ideas?

TIA---Mj
 
Nikon d700 good old workhorse and getting cheaper and I might have one to sell next month
 
A better sensor doesn't necessarily mean FF, the age of the tech is important too.
The 1d isn't FF (1.3 crop) and nor is an older one necessarily a good high ISO sensor.
 
I had a Canon 5D and I thought is was a good camera but these days even the newer MFT cameras arguably compete against it well so are you sure that an older camera will be better than your fairly recent and fairly good Oly?
 
No I am not certain is the answer. I would have thought the EM1 would be pretty good, but have aired this problem difficulty here before. Conclusion was that an MFT sensor is not as sensitive as a FF or similar.

Noise is almost always a problem, When I am out there photoing moon and stars, I try all sorts of shutter Fstop combinations. The lens has recently been serviced by Olympus, Camera is 2nd hand with maybe 10,000 shots under the belt.

Results are not particularly good. I suspect that light pollution might be a lot off the problem....

Grasping a bit at straws maybe.

"Normal" photos in daylight of terrestrial subjects are pretty IMHO (camera quality not me :(:()

Do like the EM1, don't get me wrong, but I just don't get good astro results.
 
If you want a camera body just for photographing stars and DSOs then getting the IR filter removed would be a help.

Dave
 
Mark Johnson said:
No I am not certain is the answer. I would have thought the EM1 would be pretty good, but have aired this problem difficulty here before. Conclusion was that an MFT sensor is not as sensitive as a FF or similar.

Noise is almost always a problem, When I am out there photoing moon and stars, I try all sorts of shutter Fstop combinations. The lens has recently been serviced by Olympus, Camera is 2nd hand with maybe 10,000 shots under the belt.

Results are not particularly good. I suspect that light pollution might be a lot off the problem....

Grasping a bit at straws maybe.

"Normal" photos in daylight of terrestrial subjects are pretty IMHO (camera quality not me :(:()

Do like the EM1, don't get me wrong, but I just don't get good astro results.
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If noise is the issue one answer could be to use a slightly longer lens which will give you a wider aperture and lower noise?

But I suppose the proof of the pudding is to try an older FF camera and see if the tech despite being older still wins out.
 
What exactly are you not happy about with your current setup? What settings are you using (would it help to look at changing them)? What sort of images are you taking and how are you processing them? Are you measuring your 'expectaions' against other people's images, maybe not taken with a DSLR? Are you using any sort of light pollution filter? I'm using a Canon 350D for my prime focus (using the scope as the lens) astro stuff - hardly a modern cutting edge camera! It has a filter that fits inside the body, so preventing me using it with a lens, but I'd have to ask my partner exactly what the filter does. It is currently away with a friend of ours to have the IR mod carried out. For anything that needs a lens I use my 550D, again quite a basic camera. Through the scope I take lots of very short exposures (the mount will only track accurately enough for photography for a max of 1 minute) + dark frames (to remove hot pixels etc) and chuck them over to my partner to stack in a rather expensive bit of dedicated astro imaging s/w that I may get one day but not yet. It will also do the processing but I do it myself in PaintShop. So far I've only done a few, I'm not an expert, I've spent hours over some of them and I'm still not completely happy. But therein lies the problem. Astrophotography is a lot about processing, far more so than 'normal' photography, and noise is par for the course that you have to learn how to deal with unless you're going to use a cooled CCD camera (actually having said that there are people using cooled DSLRs too now, just like some people used to used cooled film). Only you can decide what to do, but it is just something to think about.
 
Tringa said:
If you want a camera body just for photographing stars and DSOs then getting the IR filter removed would be a help.

Dave
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Vaguely understand what you mean!

manualfocus-g said:
Grab a Canon EOS 6D. Great high ISO and plenty of adapters available for old lenses, T-Mount etc. depending on what type of telescope you have (obviously check first before purchasing!!).
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That is the course I was considering of going down......

woof woof said:
If noise is the issue one answer could be to use a slightly longer lens which will give you a wider aperture and lower noise?

But I suppose the proof of the pudding is to try an older FF camera and see if the tech despite being older still wins out.
Click to expand...

When doing the moon I use the MFT 300mm lens, so that's as long as you get with MFT. My thoughts were that a larger sensor would do the trick. I used to run a Pentax Ist until it died three or four years ago. Seemed to remember getting reasonable results with that.

Jannyfox said:
What exactly are you not happy about with your current setup? What settings are you using (would it help to look at changing them)? What sort of images are you taking and how are you processing them? Are you measuring your 'expectaions' against other people's images, maybe not taken with a DSLR? Are you using any sort of light pollution filter? I'm using a Canon 350D for my prime focus (using the scope as the lens) astro stuff - hardly a modern cutting edge camera! It has a filter that fits inside the body, so preventing me using it with a lens, but I'd have to ask my partner exactly what the filter does. It is currently away with a friend of ours to have the IR mod carried out. For anything that needs a lens I use my 550D, again quite a basic camera. Through the scope I take lots of very short exposures (the mount will only track accurately enough for photography for a max of 1 minute) + dark frames (to remove hot pixels etc) and chuck them over to my partner to stack in a rather expensive bit of dedicated astro imaging s/w that I may get one day but not yet. It will also do the processing but I do it myself in PaintShop. So far I've only done a few, I'm not an expert, I've spent hours over some of them and I'm still not completely happy. But therein lies the problem. Astrophotography is a lot about processing, far more so than 'normal' photography, and noise is par for the course that you have to learn how to deal with unless you're going to use a cooled CCD camera (actually having said that there are people using cooled DSLRs too now, just like some people used to used cooled film). Only you can decide what to do, but it is just something to think about.
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Settings are usually f8 @1/200, iso 200. But I move them around to see if better results are obtained. I use the 300mm lens on a tripod. I also attach the EM1 to a 200mm Newtonian scope. Results are still not as good as I expect or want.

The images I am concerned about are of the moon, and sometimes Messiers if I can find them. Yes comparing against Canons and Nikons. There was a recent superb Nikon shot, with a 1200 mm equiv lens. Detail was so intricate. I do get quite a lot of light pollution here, and am not aware of a light pollution filter. I have played around with stacking, but really not that much. If I can crack the moon, then I will be happy to move onto the Messiers with confidence.

Anyway thanks for thoughts and replies. Will go away and think it all thru...........

MJ
 
What did photographers use 5 or 10 years ago?

Were their pics that bad?
 
Ah, I thought you said you were shooting through a telescope hence no lens. My mistake. I'm using the Sigma 150-600 at 600 (960 mm ff equivalent) for my Sun/Moon shots. f7.1 usually, iso 100, ss to suit. Logically you will get more detail with a longer lens as you have more pixels covering each detail ( you can tell I really understand how digital works.........) and don't have to enlarge so much to see the detail. The difference between using 600 mm and the 300 mm (Tamron 70-300) I used before I bought the Sigma is just slightly noticable! I'm planning to use the same lens for deep sky as soon as there's a suitable clear sky to get my driven mount out and running (the scope I talked about isn't mine and I very rarely get to use it. I only have a little 150mm reflector for visual stuff). Focusing may be the biggest problem. I'm hoping I can get enough magnification to use a bahtinov mask as I find it impossible to judge focus on the LCD.
 
woof woof said:
If noise is the issue one answer could be to use a slightly longer lens which will give you a wider aperture and lower noise?

But I suppose the proof of the pudding is to try an older FF camera and see if the tech despite being older still wins out.
Click to expand...
I'm a bit confused as to why a longer lens would give a wider aperture? :confused:
 
snerkler said:
I'm a bit confused as to why a longer lens would give a wider aperture? :confused:
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Longer lenses give BIGGER apertures at the same setting :D

There is a school of thought that says you get better results when using a physically bigger aperture. I'm just getting into this myself but from what I've read there are those claiming (for example) that when doing astro they get better noise results from a 28mm f2.8 than a 24mm f2.8 because of the bigger aperture. There's lots of blogs and discussions on this sort of thing.
 
Jannyfox said:
Ah, I thought you said you were shooting through a telescope hence no lens. My mistake. I'm using the Sigma 150-600 at 600 (960 mm ff equivalent) for my Sun/Moon shots. f7.1 usually, iso 100, ss to suit. Logically you will get more detail with a longer lens as you have more pixels covering each detail ( you can tell I really understand how digital works.........) and don't have to enlarge so much to see the detail. The difference between using 600 mm and the 300 mm (Tamron 70-300) I used before I bought the Sigma is just slightly noticable! I'm planning to use the same lens for deep sky as soon as there's a suitable clear sky to get my driven mount out and running (the scope I talked about isn't mine and I very rarely get to use it. I only have a little 150mm reflector for visual stuff). Focusing may be the biggest problem. I'm hoping I can get enough magnification to use a bahtinov mask as I find it impossible to judge focus on the LCD.
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Jan I use both scope(8") and telephoto (300mm Eqiv 600mm FF). Processed with LR6

Both results are quite poor by standards shown here on TP.

Moon again........ by Mark Johnson, on Flickr

This was taken recently with Em1, F8, ISO 200 and 300mm lens. (Tripoded!)

From afar it looks OK, but it lacks detail when closer. Other photos of the moon here on TP show much more detail. https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/t...es-it-is-but-take-a-look-anyway-go-on.635950/

Maybe I am expecting too much from MFT but something ain't doing for me!!

Mj
 
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kendo1 said:
What did photographers use 5 or 10 years ago?

Were their pics that bad?
Click to expand...
Astrophotographers is something that's blossomed over recent years, mainly due to better sensor technology.

I don't ever remember people shooting the Milky Way 10 years ago (except from space)
 
I have to confess I know nothing about your particular type of camera, Mark. I've only used film slrs then dslrs, both low spec Canons. In its day the 350D was reckoned THE dslr for astro. There was a reason but I can't remember what it was, but that was why we bought one, and it's still going strong.

Astrophotography has become so popular because modern dslrs, accessable powerful processing and the mass market driven mounts, releatively cheap scopes and Go-To, so you only have to be able to identify one star to find a really obscure DSO (deep sky object), make it easy for anyone to have a go, though some will always reach a standard the rest of us can only bow to (I'm thinking Swag72 and a few others that won't be so familiar to the rest of you).
 
Mark Johnson said:
Do like the EM1, don't get me wrong, but I just don't get good astro results.
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E-M1 sensor is known to be noisier at long exposures than the other m4/3rds sensors when it was released : that info was a little bit supressed as it was the flagship model.
For tiny money you could pick up a used e-pm2 : the cheapest m4/3rds with the sensor from the E-M5 which is far less noisy at long exposures.
I assume you already have the adapters for m4/3rds-to-telescope so this makes sense to try.
 
woof woof said:
Longer lenses give BIGGER apertures at the same setting :D

There is a school of thought that says you get better results when using a physically bigger aperture. I'm just getting into this myself but from what I've read there are those claiming (for example) that when doing astro they get better noise results from a 28mm f2.8 than a 24mm f2.8 because of the bigger aperture. There's lots of blogs and discussions on this sort of thing.
Click to expand...
Ahh, the actual physical aperture size you mean ;) Didn't realise this would make a difference as I thought it was just down to the intensity of light hitting the sensor, interesting (y)
 
snerkler said:
Ahh, the actual physical aperture size you mean ;) Didn't realise this would make a difference as I thought it was just down to the intensity of light hitting the sensor, interesting (y)
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Maybe the larger area of glass collects more photons? The front element on my 85mm 1.4 is about twice the size of that on my 50mm 1.4 - I appreciate this doesn't ALWAYS correlate, and some of the ART and Batis lenses have extremely large front elements for their aperture/FL.
 
Does the om1 have long exposure noise reduction? Long exposure noise is relatively successfully rectified in camera I thought?
 
snerkler said:
Ahh, the actual physical aperture size you mean ;) Didn't realise this would make a difference as I thought it was just down to the intensity of light hitting the sensor, interesting (y)
Click to expand...

I had a bit of a problem believing this and as I said I'm just about at day one with this so don't take anything I say as gospel :D but if you Google your way to the many blogs and forums on this you may or may not be convinced by the idea :D As they seem to know what they're talking about maybe it's true? Worth reading up on anyway and if it works I'd imagine that the smaller sensor systems like MFT may benefit from the point of making them not so good for this to being good enough? Multiple exposures and tracking may be the way forward though for the best image quality.
 
woof woof said:
I had a bit of a problem believing this and as I said I'm just about at day one with this so don't take anything I say as gospel :D but if you Google your way to the many blogs and forums on this you may or may not be convinced by the idea :D As they seem to know what they're talking about maybe it's true? Worth reading up on anyway and if it works I'd imagine that the smaller sensor systems like MFT may benefit from the point of making them not so good for this to being good enough? Multiple exposures and tracking may be the way forward though for the best image quality.
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I'm sure there's a lot of clever people out there who have calculated all this and there could well be something in it. I'm sure that I read somewhere that not all f1.4 lenses are exactly f1.4 etc etc as well so I guess it's also going to be lens dependant? I'm sure the difference is minimal though, and as I don't shoot astro anyway I'll not worry about it ;)
 
Ulfric M Douglas said:
E-M1 sensor is known to be noisier at long exposures than the other m4/3rds sensors when it was released : that info was a little bit supressed as it was the flagship model.
For tiny money you could pick up a used e-pm2 : the cheapest m4/3rds with the sensor from the E-M5 which is far less noisy at long exposures.
I assume you already have the adapters for m4/3rds-to-telescope so this makes sense to try.
Click to expand...

The shot in post #17 shows (looking at FLIKR) a shutter speed of 1/320th s so not really a long exposure. I'm wondering if IS of any kind was left on while the camera/lens was tripod mounted and/or if the camera/lens needed it off? 1/320th should be easily hand holdable with OS with an EFL of 600mm so maybe there's a problem with the OP's equipment.
 
Nod said:
The shot in post #17 shows (looking at FLIKR) a shutter speed of 1/320th s so not really a long exposure. I'm wondering if IS of any kind was left on while the camera/lens was tripod mounted and/or if the camera/lens needed it off? 1/320th should be easily hand holdable with OS with an EFL of 600mm so maybe there's a problem with the OP's equipment.
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Could also be atmospheric aberrations. Sometimes my moon shots have come out like this if the atmosphere's not favourable. My best moon shots have come from real cold crisp evenings. Plus, even at 600mm eq you have to crop a lot to get the framing like this and m4/3 don't crop anywhere near as well as FF from my experience.
 
snerkler said:
Could also be atmospheric aberrations. Sometimes my moon shots have come out like this if the atmosphere's not favourable. My best moon shots have come from real cold crisp evenings. Plus, even at 600mm eq you have to crop a lot to get the framing like this and m4/3 don't crop anywhere near as well as FF from my experience.
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I've found this over Saturday and Sunday. I didn't get a single useable moon shot on Saturday but on Sunday results were much better with exactly the same kit.
 
woof woof said:
I've found this over Saturday and Sunday. I didn't get a single useable moon shot on Saturday but on Sunday results were much better with exactly the same kit.
Click to expand...

Which is why a lot of people these days doing Moon/planetary imaging take video and stack the frames in Registax or something similar. And why when I photograph sunspots (usually at around 1/1000 sec), I'll routinely take 10 shots or even more then pick the best one to process.
 
Nod said:
The shot in post #17 shows (looking at FLIKR) a shutter speed of 1/320th s so not really a long exposure. I'm wondering if IS of any kind was left on while the camera/lens was tripod mounted and/or if the camera/lens needed it off? 1/320th should be easily hand holdable with OS with an EFL of 600mm so maybe there's a problem with the OP's equipment.
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IS Is definitely off. At least that what the settings say.

As said earlier, lens has been cleaned and serviced by Olympus very recently, and camera tho' 2nd hand has about 10,000 shots to its credit. :(
 
Try similar settings but with IS on and handheld. Maybe even drop a stop of ISO and see if that cleans up the noise without introducing camera shake. How are you focussing? Maybe a fine tune using fully zoomed in live view in manual focus mode will sharpen things up a bit?
 
Mark Johnson said:
IS Is definitely off. At least that what the settings say.

As said earlier, lens has been cleaned and serviced by Olympus very recently, and camera tho' 2nd hand has about 10,000 shots to its credit. :(
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There's 2 main things and potentially one more that I think are leading to your disappointment with this image imo. Firstly from my experience the Olly 75-300mm is not the sharpest lens at the long end. The Panny 100-300mm I had was sharper than my 75-300mm at the long end by a tiny amount, but both came up short compared to my Tamron 150-600mm for my D750. Secondly, as I mentioned previously m4/3 don't crop as well/cleanly as FF (or APS-C for that matter) and you have cropped this image pretty heavily leading to 1440 on the longest edge. Looking back at it now I've oversharpened this (I will go back and re-edit this later) but this is at 1600 on the longest edge and considering the extra resolution of the D750 it's probably cropped by a similar amount. When I had my Olly EM5-II I would try to avoid cropping to this degree as it started to degrade images.

Morning Moon by TDG-77, on Flickr


Thirdly, there's the potential of the atmosphere playing a part as previously mentioned.
 
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That's very good and better than anything I can get with my Panny 45-200mm. What lens did you use?

My G7 and 45-200mm can't match what I was getting with my Canon 20D and mediocre 70-300mm.
 
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woof woof said:
That's very good and better than anything I can get with my Panny 45-200mm. What lens did you use?

My G7 and 45-200mm can't match what I was getting with my Canon 20D and mediocre 70-300mm.
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Sorry, think I've confused you. That was the D750 with Tamron 150-600mm.
 
Many thanks for the advice and thoughts all.

Still not sure which way to go. EM1 is great in good light, but the sensor ain't so hot in bad light. Mind the moon cannot really be classed as bad light, opposite in fact.

I am playing around with noise settings and will see what effect on and off has. I guess Off might increase noise, but maybe add detail.........

Looked at a youtube video where the guy worked out that the density of the individual sensors are about the same in a MFT and a FF if I understood what he meant. So detail should be similar in both, but I understand noise is more prevalent in the smaller MFT sensor.

Looking at the MFT shots of the moon on Flickr, the shots do show good amount of detail, more than my camera does. May just be it was why the previous owner sold it on. Might consider having it serviced...................

Mj
 
Mark Johnson said:
Many thanks for the advice and thoughts all.

Still not sure which way to go. EM1 is great in good light, but the sensor ain't so hot in bad light. Mind the moon cannot really be classed as bad light, opposite in fact.

I am playing around with noise settings and will see what effect on and off has. I guess Off might increase noise, but maybe add detail.........

Looked at a youtube video where the guy worked out that the density of the individual sensors are about the same in a MFT and a FF if I understood what he meant. So detail should be similar in both, but I understand noise is more prevalent in the smaller MFT sensor.

Looking at the MFT shots of the moon on Flickr, the shots do show good amount of detail, more than my camera does. May just be it was why the previous owner sold it on. Might consider having it serviced...................

Mj
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Smaller sensors put more demand on lenses so a smaller sensor will never be as sharp, all other things considered equal.
 
snerkler said:
Smaller sensors put more demand on lenses so a smaller sensor will never be as sharp, all other things considered equal.
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Yup. On MFT you need really nice lenses if you're going to pixel peep, print big and view close or crop and of course with moon shots you're likely to crop heavily.

There's some interesting reading on astro photography over at Clarkvision.

For example here he's talking about cameras and lenses...

http://www.clarkvision.com/articles...-and-lenses-for-nightscape-astro-photography/

PS.
His views on sensitivity FF v crop may not sit well with some but I'm happy to say that I agree :D and actually I think this ties in well with the crop factor in that some seem to want to shoot with smaller systems the same as they would with larger, I think that considering the crop factor and the implications of it are important.

"Contrary to popular internet belief, larger sensor cameras have little to do with sensitivity. We often read on the internet that full frame cameras are more sensitive and that they are better at low light photography. This is a misunderstanding of the light gathering of lens and sensor. A larger format ENABLES one to use a larger lens. It is the lens that collects the light; the sensor is just a bucket to collect the light delivered by the lens (Figure 8)."

"Here is another way to look at the problem. Think of it this way: you have a full frame camera and after you take the image, you crop the image. You changed the field of view. You did not change the actual focal length. A crop sensor is just a smaller sensor--think of it as full frame pre-cropped so you don't have to crop in post processing. It does not change the lens attached in any way--the focal length is the same. The aperture is the same. The amount of light gathered within the frame is the same. The smaller sensor just means a smaller field of view. Why people think that changes sensitivity is surprising."

I suppose the implications for shooting with MFT in low light are that you'll get better results if you use a longer lens with a wider aperture. The drawback is that your field of view will be changed and tighter.
 
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