camera for night sky

Glaucus

Glaucus

Glaucus

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Is it possible to get a camera for £200, second hand is fine that would be good for taking pictures of stary night sky.
I see things like canon eos 10d/20d/400d are very cheap second hand but with out lenses. But what camera and lens would be suitable, would also like a lenses for general landscape, waterfalls, rock formations that sort of thing. Reading guides, they seem to say any lens will work, but ones with a low f rating are ideal f/2.8 or smaller.
 
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I think £200 would be pushing it find something with decent high ISO capability for night sky photography. I would think something like a second hand Canon 5D or Nikon D7000 would be your best bang for buck for that kind of stuff.
 
If you're going for night sky with long shutter speeds and a tripod, autofocus would seem unnecessary from my point of view. You can get great deals on old non-AFS lenses or even older non-AF lenses - I still run a 35 f2 and a 50 f1.4 on my D700 which I originally got for my F2!

If you know what focal length you want then I'd definitely recommend a prime (non-zoom) lens as you generally get a wider aperture and a better image quality overall when compared to a zoom

Downside is you don't have the flexibility of a modern zoom and you do lose AF, so less useful if you want to use it for anything where fast acquisition is necessary. Though from the look of your OP, with lots of static photography, an old prime would work well
 
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cwgk91 said:
If you're going for night sky with long shutter speeds and a tripod, autofocus would seem unnecessary from my point of view. You can get great deals on old non-AFS lenses or even older non-AF lenses - I still run a 35 f2 and a 50 f1.4 on my D700 which I originally got for my F2!

If you know what focal length you want then I'd definitely recommend a prime (non-zoom) lens as you generally get a wider aperture and a better image quality overall when compared to a zoom

Downside is you don't have the flexibility of a modern zoom and you do lose AF, so less useful if you want to use it for anything where fast acquisition is necessary. Though from the look of your OP, with lots of static photography, an old prime would work well
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Also, older MF primes will have the ∞ mark for astro :)
 
Very true, didnt think about that. I had a problem doing Lunar photography once with my dad's old russian mirror 1000mm lens. Turns out just setting it at infinity on mirror lenses doesn't work so well..
 
You saying get a manual focus lens for the night sky.
As auto focus would be useful for taking landscape and such pictures.

Can you guys link to products.
 
I just think that a manual focus lens is fine for anything where timing is not (quite as) key, such as night sky, landscapes, etc. Anything which could involve a tripod really. Other added benefit is they're smaller and lighter.

Do you know roughly what focal length you're looking for?
 
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32mm or lower, wider the better, the pros use the 14mm lens. But they're pricey. For the star shots.

A variable would probably be useful for the other stuff, but would probably come the next pay check.
 
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In that sort of focal range, the 18-55mm kit lens which you get with most DSLRs would probably do you very nicely for the price.

Since you'll be going for an APS-C sized sensor camera, there is a 1.5x crop factor involved, so to get 30mm you'd have to find a 20mm lens which can be quite pricey.

With 10MP, the 40D should definitely be more than adequate, although I have never owned a canon so can't comment. Main thing for night skies is a decent tripod!
 
cwgk91 said:
Since you'll be going for an APS-C sized sensor camera, there is a 1.5x crop factor involved, so to get 30mm you'd have to find a 20mm lens which can be quite pricey.

d!
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Can Yu convert this to English please, if you haven't guessed I really don't know anything. Only reason I've been able to give numbers is due to guides.
 
cwgk91 said:
In that sort of focal range, the 18-55mm kit lens which you get with most DSLRs would probably do you very nicely for the price.

Since you'll be going for an APS-C sized sensor camera, there is a 1.5x crop factor involved, so to get 30mm you'd have to find a 20mm lens which can be quite pricey.

With 10MP, the 40D should definitely be more than adequate, although I have never owned a canon so can't comment. Main thing for night skies is a decent tripod!
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Yeah the tripod does kind of eat the budget though. A decentish tripod for long exposures gets expensive.

Would it be worth finding a body with the kit lens and then a cheapish manual lens. Can't you get those adapters that give the audible bleep when focused correctly on MF?
 
I think you'd be better off going for a decent second hand dslr and kit lens then use what ever money is left to pick up a cheap but half decent second hand tripod.

If you've not used a DSLR before you're most likely going to want to try shooting a few different things and getting a specific use prime will limit that somewhat, especially considering we don't have a great view of the milky way here and the quite frequent cloud cover.

With the kit lens you'd pick up most stars with a 25-30 second exposure at around ISO1600-3200 (ISO sets how sensitive the camera is to light but as a drawback you have more static noise)

If you wanted to pick out some of the dust around the milky way or concentrate on a prominent galaxy, you still can with a kit lens but you'd have to stack your images and spend a fair bit more time on the post processing.

Stacking involves taking around 20-30 pictures of the same stars, then 5-10 black images with the lens cap on so the software can work out what is sensor noise and what is a star, 5 bias shots which are taken at the fastest shutter speed to allow the software to remove hot/stuck pixels and finally a few flat frames you usually take on your wall at home.

Once you have all of the images above you then use something like deep sky stacker to stack all the images and give you one final image. You can have a look at: http://www.astrobin.com/search/ to give you an idea on what image stacking can do.

Spending more on gear is more a trade off for time, the better the gear you have the less time you spend on post processing the images.
 
I know how to stack, been learning that with some remote telescope photography. Assuming Maxim DL5, can use RAW files. rather than FIT.
So what body and lens would you recommend PUZE?
If I get into it, then I can add more lenses latter. As long as a starter kit would get some half decent stuff.

I'll be taking it to dartmoor and other dark places, and then towards the end of the year Kilimanjaro, which should provide some very good night skies.
 
Last year I got my girlfriend a second hand D3100 and 18-55mm kit lens for around £280 I think second hand. Since the 3200 and 3300 have come out since then there may be some bargains out there I think, on either the 3200 or 3100. Would definitely recommend one of those. Great sensor and ergonomics.

Other thing is theyre small and light, so good for travel. You may be able to pick up a cheapish tripod as well potentially
 
For your quite tight budget the best your going to get is a Canon 500d and kit lens from the bay, you can pick them up buy it now for a touch over your budget, but I'm sure if you looked carefully you could snap up a bargain for bellow your budget.

The D90 is what's best in the nikon camp for around budget but is much harder to find around your price range, I wouldn't even consider a D80 they have pretty horrendous noise past ISO 1600.

I think you're better off going down the canon 500d route to start with, it's a great camera for the price and will give you a great basis to build on especially considering the cannon support in astro programs :)
 
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