Remot control of Canon 6d from app

[Astrofriend]

Hi,
I continue to get my Star Adventure to perform better.

One very big problem if you have a camera that you can not tilt the display at, no tiltable display. I have the Canon 6D. It's almost impossible to see the display and do settings when the camera aim upwards to the zenith. I have until now used a very tall tripod, but that is something very big and not so friendly when travel.

Instead of buying a new camera I now test to use an app in my smart phone and used that to see the display in live view from the camera.

I have written a tutorial in an early stage of how I do that:
http://www.astrofriend.eu/astronomy/tutorials/tutorial-canon-remote-control/page01-tutorial-canon-remote-control.html

I will correct and add more inforamtion when I get more experience from this.

I'm sure most of you alreday have done this, my concern is, how hot will the camera be. I have bad experience from this from earlier test with live view.

/Lars

[Wavytone]

Hi Lars,

These are some of the reasons why I opted for a Panasonic GX85. It has a tilt screen - perfectly useable when the camera is pointed at ceilings in churches (!) or the zenith - and even better, Panasonic have a great WiFi app which provides LiveView on a mobile phone and full control over all camera functions. Arguably the neatest thing is a double-tap on the screen will trigger the shutter - without touching the camera.

The other thing in their recent cameras is they have no anti-aliasing filter, just a Bayer mosaic.

Maybe good enough for some casual experiments with the moon and planets but not good enough for DSOs.

That said I am sure an astrocamera from ZWO or QHY would be much, much better.

[skysurfer]

If you have an Android smartphone, use DSLR controller (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.dslrcontrol ler). I have a 6d as well, but the larger phone display replaces the fixed camera back display even better than a tilted display of its successors (6dmkii or eos R.) It works on both wifi (slow with RAWs) and USB with an OTG adapter.

[Astrofriend]

Hi,
@Skysurfer
Yes that app looks to be better then the Canon. Before I switch to another app I shall test with my pad and see if that's a better device for this. And least when I don't travel to far.

@Wavytone,
Interesting, I wish Canon could skip that filter too. Is it the noise that make it bad for astrophotographing of deep sky objects? I mean relative a Canon or Nikon DSLR.

/Lars

[Astrofriend]

I added one more page to my tutorial how to use the Canon Connect app to control the Canon EOS camera. I found a way to disable the annoying behavier of the camera to do a auto focus on every photo it takes but still have the lens in auto focus mode.

My tutorial:
http://www.astrofriend.eu/astronomy/tutorials/tutorial-canon-remote-control/page01-tutorial-canon-remote-control.html

You find the last on page 4.

I use this when I only have the tripod with me, photographing meteor showers etc.

/Lars