Micro 4/3rds lens for night sky photography?

ian-83

ian-83

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What lens do people recommend for micro 4/3rds for doing some night time photography of the stars?

From what I read I need a f/stop around 1.8? But what about focal length?

And could I achieve anything with a 14-140 lens? Or is the aperture of f3.5 too slow?
 
The wider the aperture, the more light you'll be able to capture for the same length of exposure, so you'll capture feinter stars. f/3.5 will still work, you'll just not capture as much (assuming a single exposure, and not tracked on a mount or anything).

To work out the maximum exposure you can use before the rotation of the Earth causes the stars to start to trail, divide 600 by the focal length setting of your lens. This assumes a full-frame sensor, so for micro 4/3 double the focal length to get the correct result.

e.g. if you have your MFT lens set at 14mm, divide 600 by 28mm to get the result (a 21 second exposure). At 140mm you'd be looking at an approx 2 second exposure (600 \ 280) which would be too short to capture anything but the very brightest stars.
 
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The 12mm f/2.0 is typically the one although I think Samyang have recently release a good MF alternative.
 
Nawty said:
The 12mm f/2.0 is typically the one although I think Samyang have recently release a good MF alternative.
Click to expand...

That or the Olympus 8mm f1.8
There is also the voigtlander 10.5mm f0.95
The Panasonic 12mm f1.4
The Samyang 12mm f2 is only £279 Samyang also do a 10mm f2.8
 
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you can use f3.5 as said above - i did a milky way attempt last year on holiday with the Samyang FE but my e-m1 isn't best suited to long exposures so it was quite noisy. So much so, that i had better results with my RX100 mk2 - admittedly i could use f1.8 but its always annoying when a compact works better
 
flyingmonkeycorp said:
No idea, I'm new to M43 but I'm off up to Kielder this weekend so I'll probably have a bash. I'll let you know how it goes (kit lens but also a bunch of Nikon lenses with an adapter).
Click to expand...

I'll keep an eye out for any results you post.

FishyFish said:
The wider the aperture, the more light you'll be able to capture for the same length of exposure, so you'll capture feinter stars. f/3.5 will still work, you'll just not capture as much (assuming a single exposure, and not tracked on a mount or anything).

To work out the maximum exposure you can use before the rotation of the Earth causes the stars to start to trail, divide 600 by the focal length setting of your lens. This assumes a full-frame sensor, so for micro 4/3 double the focal length to get the correct result.

e.g. if you have your MFT lens set at 14mm, divide 600 by 28mm to get the result (a 21 second exposure). At 140mm you'd be looking at an approx 2 second exposure (600 \ 280) which would be too short to capture anything but the very brightest stars.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the formula will give it a go.

Nawty said:
The 12mm f/2.0 is typically the one although I think Samyang have recently release a good MF alternative.
Click to expand...

alfbranch said:
That or the Olympus 8mm f1.8
There is also the voigtlander 10.5mm f0.95
The Panasonic 12mm f1.4
The Samyang 12mm f2 is only £279 Samyang also do a 10mm f2.8
Click to expand...

I'll have a look for those lenses.

damianmkv said:
you can use f3.5 as said above - i did a milky way attempt last year on holiday with the Samyang FE but my e-m1 isn't best suited to long exposures so it was quite noisy. So much so, that i had better results with my RX100 mk2 - admittedly i could use f1.8 but its always annoying when a compact works better
Click to expand...

Hoping my G7 won't be too bad.
 
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