The Colours of the Orion Nightsky

[gregbradley]

Taken last weekend at my dark site with a minor early setting moon lighting up the foreground.

8 panel panorama.

http://upload.pbase.com/image/153750473

Greg.

[Rod771]

Excellent use of the moon light Greg, well done :thumbsup:

[gregbradley]

Thanks Rod. Its been a while since I did a nightscape. Nice to be out.

Greg.

[Antu]

Welcome back to the track, Greg ! Impressive airglow - it seem it was all over the sky.

[nebulosity.]

Great image there Greg, I see you've got the new Sony A7r, what do you think of it?

Cheers
Jo

[Ross G]

A beautiful panorama Greg.

I love the foreground.

You didn't waste any time getting the new Sony. It's on my list as well.
It will be interesting to hear your thoughts on it.

Ross.

[gregbradley]

I'll say. And we sometimes wonder how we get gradients in our deep sky images even though we were at a dark site!!



A7R is very good. Noise levels are perhaps very slightly worse than D800E (hard to be completely sure but this image had more luminance noise than I normally would have expected and it was a cold night - 6C when I took this shot, despite it being summer!). Noise difference is marginal. I like the tilt screen and the evf for focusing makes focusing very simple. My main concern is I got bad streaky stars in the last 20% of the image both sides. I did not notice this until I started processing the images. It doesn't show up in this mosaic due to the large overlap in images.


I tested it further and the 14-24 with the adapters I have will not focus out to the edges when the centre is sharp. It may be an adapter issue. I am getting a Novoflex adapter and if that fails then that would be a bummer. I have Samyang 24mm F1.4 (that works well on A7r) and a Zeiss 21mm may be on the wish list. Overall a good camera. Autowhite balance works well. Same with Nex 6. Focus peaking is the best out there and the electronic viewfinder will convert optical viewfinder stalwarts. Manual focus is a breeze between focus peaking and magnified view, so its good for legacy lenses that require manual focus. Surprisingly the menu system is good. Nex 6 menu system is shockingly bad - like shockingly, as if a 2 year old designed it.
The main thing about the camera is the compactness and lightness. It sits on Polarie a bit better (it needs an L bracket though as its smaller size meant it hits the ballhead sooner at some angles for some reason) although Polarie manages the D800E fine as well. Ergonomics are good (dials and knobs are all in more or less the right position so you can keep your eye on the evf and adjust). Wysiwyg so adjusting parameters to get ideal terrestial exposure is very easy so not many reject images.

The main criticisms of the camera so far on the net have been the overly loud shutter (it is pretty loud but I don't particularly mind, some hate that), rangefinder lenses below 35mm are likely to have side shading and magenta (some of these may correct with Adobe DNG flat field Photoshop plug in) and some don't like the look of it (I do). The pluses are the small size, the Sony Exmor sensor, the tilt screen, wifi, nfc, focus peaking and magnify view, the evf is extremely good, the LCD is very good but needs a protector (very prone to fingerprints), the shutter release is slightly in the wrong spot ergnomically and is soft to press (I like that as easier to avoid shutter shock but some hate it preferring the half press type shutter release). Build quality is high, buttons and dials all seem good. Video is a notch above probably both Nikon and Canon (although lower bitrate than Canon). It seemed particularly lifelike and AF works in video in a very non distracting way plus some lenses allow steady shot which stabilises the video and power zoom, digital zoom, HDMI out, zebra stripes to make sure highlights on skin are not blown etc. Face detect/tracking AF is amazing to watch when videoing. I used to be amazed with Nex 6 for video. Very good.

So if you are into video this one is a notch above. Sony has always been strong on video.

A7 is the 24mp A7r is the 36.3mp Exmor sensor. A7r requires a faster shutter speed approach to photography to reduce motion blur. I use auto ISO 3200, set to S mode, set shutter to 1/1000th for outdoors or 1/320th sec indoors and set aperture to suit depth of field effects and let the camera chose the ISO (high ISO noise is really low). I used a similar exposure strategy on the Fuji XE1 and it works really well and always gets the shot, indoors or out. I don't like fiddling with the settings on these complex cameras and want the camera to be in the background so I get the shot.

Greg.



Thanks Ross. There was a 1/4 moon setting behind my view there. Makes a change from my usual mosaics with black foregrounds. I normally only go to my dark site during the new moon for imaging. The new moon is not ideal for nightscapes.

The main downside to the Sony A7r compared to the Nikon D800E is the fact that the Sony emount flange distance (distance from the mount edge to the sensor) is really short - like 23mm versus something like 48mm. This means that rangefinder style wide angle lenses give shading at the edges and a magenta cast. DSLR type lenses should be ok but I think it will come down to adapter quality. My 14-24 has a big question mark over it now on this camera. Its pretty demanding to no flex and exact distances. The panorama software reported focal length was 12.9mm when I had the lens set to 14mm.

Greg.

[RickS]

Lovely nightscape, Greg! The colours are great.

[gregbradley]

Thanks Rick. You never know what you will pick up with nightscapes. This night had some lovely colours in the sky that only the camera picks up.

Greg.

[nebulosity.]

Thanks so much for your awesome detailed reply Greg :thumbsup: the best info I've been able to read about the camera.

:thanx:

Jo

[dutch2]

Wonderful colours Greg, an amazing sky.
:thumbsup:

[gregbradley]

Thanks Ingrid. Its ahrd to tell just looking at the night sky if there is airglow going on or not. The camera picks it up pretty well though.




You're welcome Jo.

Greg.

[iceman]

That's a lovely shot, Greg. Beautiful.

[gregbradley]

Thanks Mike. I would have liked to have caught a bit more of the foreground. Next time I'll be more careful of the framing. Also I found my L bracket so I can shoot in portrait mode which will help as well.

Greg.