Cool! Thanks for the correction. Makes me wish I had also taken the 150-450 or 600 F/4 lol

@@KobieMC lol yeah good luck trying to track with that lol. But if you try it I'd love to see that video.

Came here to note that's a really cool picture of the Andromeda galaxy, for the focal length.

@@jawats Thanks!

Sorry to hear you can't get over 30 seconds of good tracking with Astrotracer. With my K-3II I successfully track up to 2 minutes with certain lenses. I might have even done 3 minutes occasionally. Of course, Astrotracer tracking time depends on focal length. At 300mm, I can't do usually any better than 20 seconds reliably. Stacking has many benefits but so does tracking. However it is done, tracking allows using lower ISO's, resulting in higher dynamic range and hence better colors on brighter stars that would otherwise saturate. And who says you can't track and stack? It's almost all I do. Re dark frames, I haven't found them necessary with the K-3II. But I do always dither, which allows hot pixels to be removed during stacking (as well as other benefits).

Thanks!

Thanks man and it's so worth the trip!

Thank you.

A GOTO mount does not necessarily reduce the "pain" of polar alignment. However, some GOTO mounts, like mine, do include a mode that makes very accurate polar alignment much faster than, say, doing a drift alignment (which I used to do in my film days). But you know what else reduces the pain of polar alignment? Astrotracer, because you don't need to do it at all. Nor do you need to to be able to see Polaris or any particular part of the sky (three-star alignment usually requires widely separated reference stars). That has come in handy for me a number of times. EQ mounts and trackers (mini-EQ-mounts, really) are great and are camera agnostic. But I haven't bothered to use one for taking astrophotos through lenses since I got my K-3II. (I still use my EQ mount to photograph through a telescope.)

Thanks! Yes I've used the timelapse feature, BUT, surprisingly, there is no time-lapse video option in the K-3 III 😯

Turn off "exposure simulation" in the menu (it's either in the C menu or the wrench menu). Use focus peaking to find the brightest star and manually focus until the star is as small as possible.

I hear you. One thing to check is that you don't have exposure simulation on for live view, If/once it's off then make sure your focus peaking setting is set to highlight edge, then with the camera on the tripod find the brightest object in the sky and manually focus on it until it's as small as possible, press the "OK" button for Focus peaking to ensure perfect focus. Once that's done, you can move the camera where you need it as long as the focus ring hasn't been touched/moved.

It would be the same as any other Pentax camera using astrotracer. You'd have to run the calibration sequence for each session.

Is that on the initial shot right after you press the shutter button, or after it's done it's preliminary assessment shot and is now taking the actual photo?

@KobieMC After its done its preliminary shot

@@2011spikel Which lens are you using and did the scene have a lot of foreground or was it all sky?

@KobieMC was using the Pentax 18-135 just outside my house probably not ideal to test no foreground was trying to get crescent moon Jupiter and Venus as aligned, Have you ever tried it with a big telephoto lens or not

I don't believe it will work with the moon. If you were looking at the screen, right when it stopped, I believe there's a failure message that briefly pops up.

No worries, it's all good.