I drove Skyline (hwy 35) home from SF tonight. The moon hadn't risen, the sky was clear, and I wanted to play with my astrotracer.
It is going to take some learning, and a fair amount of work, to get full performance out of it. It's a very clever hack, but a bit of pixel peeping quickly shows the limitations of the technique. On the other hand, Just doing one long shot, without the astrotracer engaged, for comparison shows how well it actually does work. When I have some time I'll put some more work into processing shots from tonight. Here are three of interest: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157627826187609/ The first one is proof that you can photograph Jupiter's moons with a 250mm lens. The second is pretty much the same shot, but not cropped. The third is at 16mm. Orion in the lower left, Jupiter in the lower right. One bit of good news, is that several objects in the sky are bright enough to focus on using live view. The user interface for astrotracer mode might, just possibly, be the worst user interface that I have ever had the misfortune to be subjected to. In order to take the camera from "default" to astrotracer, you have to move over four menu screens, select gps, and select astrotracer. Then to take a picture you have to select "take a picture", then you have to press the shutter. Doing just about any thing else takes you out of astrotracer, and back to the default mode. If the menu is on "select" to take a picture, and you press the shutter, you take a photo in bulb, without the astrotracer function and put the camera back into default mode. Once you have taken a photo, if you press the shutter without once again press OK to put it back in take an astrotracer picture, you take a picture in bulb mode, without the astrotracer, and put it back into default mode. If you want to look at the photo you've just taken, it puts you back into default. If you change your aperture or ISO, it puts you back into default. If, for example, you're trying to learn optimal settings by bracketing exposure time, or ISO, you press a lot of buttons taking it from default back to autotracer mode. Getting high quality shots is going to take a lot of work, both taking the photos, and post processing. Using it artistically is going to take even more work and more creativity. Star fields are pretty, but they only go so far. Also, you can only set focal length to up to 800mm, which isn't going to be enough to see much in the way of real details. Don't get me wrong, that the thing works at all, much less as well as it does, combined with the performance of the K-5 is one of those "Welcome to the twentyfreakingfirst century, here's your jetpack" moments, but the implementation is still quite rough around the edges. Collection of my astrotracer shots as I go: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/collections/72157627826423347/ -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
