I bought another camera, a Pentax K-1

I've been wanting another Pentax camera for a long time, namely for the Astrotrac feature .

Anyway, I got the camera on Friday and Friday night I took a couple of shots of the night sky in my backyard. Having never used this feature, I way overexposed the shot. I also was just shooting in my backyard, in a neighborhood, so there was a lot of light pollution.

Here's what I got with a 1 minute shot using an old Takumar 200mm F3.5 lens.




And after cleaning it up as best I could, here is the edited shot. You can see the dust lanes and M110 as well




I am going to try to get to some darker skies this next week, learn how to take better exposures and take a series of photos and stack them. This camera is REALLY going to get me some great night time shots. I've been using a D600 and Samyang 14mm f2.8 lens for Milky Way shots for years. I can't wait to see what the Astrotrac feature brings to my photography.

[Kevin B123]

Well taken, that is impressive for a single shot. The K-1 with the utility of the moving screen will serve you very well.
It just adds more weight to my thinking on FF too.

[Colorado CJ]

Thanks!

Here's another from tonight, same suburban skies. This is 8, 20 second shots at 3200 ISO using the K-1 and a Soviet Tair 3 300mm F4.5 lens.

I have no idea what I am doing with the stacking program, or what dark frames, light frames or biased frames are. I just pushed my way through the program, then adjusted it in Photoshop. It is going to be a fun hobby, but I can see already that I have A LOT to learn.

I also have to see how to best use the Astrotracer feature as I am getting some trailing at 20 seconds with a 300mm lens.