Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

[Phill D]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

OK so I gave it a go at 60fps first burst seemed to go ok but now the camera seems to have gone into lock down! Nothing on the LCD but an illuminated evf just showing the battery symbol and the % remaining dropping slowly. It's been like this for about 5 minutes or so. Surely this isn't normal? is it?

[Phill D]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

Cant be normal as after another 5 minutes and with battery down to 11% I've turned it off. But it wont even turn off! battery now flashing red and no % readout?

[Phill D]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

OK now removed the battery, replaced with new one and phew I seem to have a working camera again. Think I'll call it a night and leave it and me to cool down till tomorrow! it does seem to have taken 46 shots though before it had a fit.

[wornish]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

That's very very strange.
Be interested to see if it captured any pictures.

[MJ224]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

Perhaps its the camera bucket (yes buffer!!))full so is taking time to write it to the memory card...…

What is it called???

[Greytop]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

OK now removed the battery, replaced with new one and phew I seem to have a working camera again. Think I'll call it a night and leave it and me to cool down till tomorrow! it does seem to have taken 46 shots though before it had a fit.

That was strange Phill, glad it's all working OK now that you've changed the battery.

By the way you can limit the number of frames taken in a single burst in the menu, I've limited mine to 40 frames.

[Phill D]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

OK so looked at the images and yes it's captured 46 of them. Here's the first with a little tweaking in LR.



Hmmm... I'm quite pleased with that actually as a first attempt. Not up to your standard guys but it was only hand held with the 40-150 +1.4tc and cropped quite a bit. So maybe it's worth downloading the registax programme for a play later.

[Greytop]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

OK so looked at the images and yes it's captured 46 of them. Here's the first with a little tweaking in LR.



Hmmm... I'm quite pleased with that actually as a first attempt. Not up to your standard guys but it was only hand held with the 40-150 +1.4tc and cropped quite a bit. So maybe it's worth downloading the registax programme for a play later.

Looking good Phill

[wornish]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

Don't put yourself down it's an excellent shot Phil. Definitely worth having a play with Registax. I find its better to only do a stack say 8 (to 10 max) shots as the returns of doing more are really un noticeable.

I think your problem with the camera stopping might have been caused by a full buffer and it just couldn't handle the sheer number of shots coming in.

[Greytop]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

I find its better to only do a stack say 8 (to 10 max) shots as the returns of doing more are really un noticeable.

I'd add the caveat that that's dependant on a number factors but yes if you've got ten good quality images then you should get a good result.
Alternatively select a series of 'best' frames/images to merge if you don't fancy merging multiples

[Bikie John]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

Phill - your description of the lockup sounds similar to the problems that some of us had with the E-M1 Mark I when it was new. It just seized up under apparently random circumstances, and among the many things it wouldn't do was switch off. The only remedy was to remove the battery and count to 10.

Of course, knowing this is no help with the astro work - but might save you draining a battery next time! I wonder if it is some combination of the memory card speed and buffers filling up or something. It shouldn't happen, but if it is going to then this is probably a pretty thorough stress test.

John

[MikeOxon]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

Looking good Phil. Remember a lot depends on the speed of your SD card.



When I tested (LargeFine+RAW), my Lexar 16GB 1000X UHS-II card, in slot 1, took 8 seconds to write a burst of 20 high-speed frames (60fps), whereas the Sandisk Ultra 80MB/s card, in slot 2, took 1 minute and 5 seconds for 20 frames.


A slow card will rapidly cause buffer indigestion! A 2000X card should digest 20 frames in about 4 sec.

[Phill D]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

I did wonder about the buffer being full but surely it should say writing to the card or something? Not just lock up. The card was a 32GB Lexar 1800x UHSII card that I bought deliberately to try out pro capture about 6 months ago so I'd hope it was fast enough. Camera seems to have recovered ok now but i will try it again one evening to see if it throws a wobbly again.

[wornish]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

Managed to capture some more data last night on The Wizard Nebula.

This is a stack of 15 x 300sec Ha filtered plus 15 x 300sec OIII filtered.
Total exposure time 2.5 Hours.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/22888258@N06/45578538351/in/dateposted-public/

[Wally]

Re: Communal Night-Sky Photography Thread

@ Phil... Not sure if this helps? Just a thought, but if the wx was way down around freezing it might have caused the battery problem? Very cold wx can cause the battery to discharge more rapidly than normal.