Taking my brand new Sony #a7S3 out to the Big Bend of Texas for some extreme low light tests. Speed-run Astrophotopgrahy, The Geminid Meteor Shower and more!
About 2 years ago I nearly purchased the Sony A7s2, which is a consumer grade camera known especially for its low light video capabilities. It would have replaced my T3i that temporarily bit the dust. But I've been historically a Canon guy and instead purchased a Canon 6DmarkII which has been my primary timelapse camera, and a Sony RX10M4, which I've used for everything else video.
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I made this decision thinking that Sony would come out with a new replacement A7s model soon and while that really took a while, it was finally announced over the summer of 2020. And for 4 months I waited for my new Sony A7s3 to arrive . It finally did just in time for my birthday and just ahead of the #GeminidMeteorShower. (a7s3 Review)
So to put this camera to the test I went to one of the darkest places in the United States, Big Bend in West Texas.
Something special about big bend, not only is it dark, there is no air traffic. So every streak you see in these S&Q timelapses is a Geminid Meteor, not planes. And very few satellites either as this is in the middle of the night. And this was right at the peak.
S&Q mode makes meteor shower timelapses an absolute breeze and the results are wonderful compared to efforts I've made in the past.
But even more impressive for these high ISO, 1 frame per second timelapses, is that it had no issue capturing meteor smoke. And let me point out, I didn't notice these naked eye. Seeing these in post sort of blew me away and I didn't expect to capture so many smoke trails. Usually this is reserved for the brightest meteors, yet the A7sIII seemed to capture meteor smoke on even just run-of-the-mill meteors.
I'm just floored by how nice the day to night transitions are on this camera. I know this is likely something all Sony Alpha users are well aware of and used ot but, This is brand new to me and I'll be taking full advantage.
In Big Bend's super dark sky, Zodiacal light is annoyingly bright in person, and the A7S3 captures this phenomenon beautifully.
Now this is the part that really thrilled me, #Astrophotography speed runs. I'll have more examples in an upcoming video but I'll show off two. This is Andromeda. After just 5 over minutes of integration time. 10 seconds, ISO 20,000, and 35 subexposures stacked in DSS. In the past, I have taken hours long images of Andromeda in order to get results this clean.
Or how about just 5 minutes of M45. I actually don't really have much to say other than just, wow. I never thought I'd see the day that I could speed run astrophotography and take images of several targets in one night and still get results like this.
Anyway, I hope you are as excited as I am for future content I bring here. And if you are interested in the Sony A7S3, I hope this additional bit of information was helpful. Thanks for watching, subscribe so you don't miss more cool stuff like you just saw, and until then, I'll see you out there.
A rather huge, surprise feature I discovered is that in Live View and using the in camera frame stacking, You can actually sometimes see the deep sky object you are wanting to photograph. This is fantastic for composing your image without taking lots of test shots, trial and error.
Unmodified or non-astro specific Cameras are generally pretty bad at picking up Hydrogen Alpha Emission nebula which is at the very edge of human vision anyway, and the A7s3 is no different here. But even with these speed run images, I am still impressed I got as much as I did out of the North America nebula, for example. By comparison, my modified t3i picks up this Ha light like it's no one else's business. A modified A7s3 would probably kick some serious ass at Ha and I'm sure someone will be trying it soon.
In Contrast, the same settings and restrictions using the same telescope combination on my Canon 6DmII...It's well. Gross. It looks this bad because at ISO 20,000 and at the bottom of this camera's dynamic range, the color data is pretty aweful. But normally astro on this camera and gear combination would be done at ISO 3200 or 1600 with at least 10 times as much integration time and at least 3 minute long exposures. Bottom line is, I can do far more work in far less time using the A7sIII thanks to the nearly magical low-light performance. That said, the Canon has over double the resolution of the A7SIII. But even if I took a 4 panel mosaic or used some fancy drizzle processing with the Sony, it would still in theory be way less than half the time spent on integration.