Pentax Astrotracer anyone?

[Alan White]

Does anyone here use the Pentax range of fine cameras and run the Astrotracer function inbuilt?

If yes on the first count, then how successful is this function?

Presently just pondering my Digital camera direction as a keen Mirror-less user (Olympus), but Pentax is on my list,
so when the Astrotracer function was noted, it piqued my interest.

 

[vineyard]

I have a Pentax K70 (or rather its my wife's which I borrow to experiment with ) and got an Astrotracer module for testing this summer as a v light travel possibility.  The Astrotracer itself is small, light and easy to use.  You have to calibrate it when you switch it on, but its not that problematic (rotation around 3 axes) - for AP they recommend a more sensitive type of calibration which can take slightly longer.

I didn't use it that much in the end b/c I was able to use a Skyguider Pro which allowed much longer imaging time (the AT says up to 5 min exposures).  Also tbh I haven't taken to DSLR imaging that much.  Because infinity focus on the lens isn't actually infinity (it overshoots it) you have to dial back the focus ring (at least on the lens I have) which means focus is subject to driver error wrt heaviness of touch & relying on my eyes on a live-view screen.  The other thing w Pentax I've noticed is that the EKOS driver is still under development so if you want to drive it via a laptop you have to use the older INDI driver which I believe is so-so.  (There are people working on it on INDI forums, but I haven't checked lately how far they've got).

The other thing I've noticed w Pentax is that the images are large in memory terms (but maybe that's with all DSLR images?) so the microSD card can fill up & batteries run low (you can run it off transformer power tbf with a gizmo).

The only other thing that comes to mind re the Astrotracer is that depending on what the skies are like, if you're going to run up to 5min exposures, you might need a filter.  Where I am (Bortle 8) if tried to take a 5 min RAW exposure w/o filters even on low ISO setting I think it would all be blown out?

Hope that's helpful.  It is a very good camera, and the AT function is pretty clever - I think if you can pair it with a clip-in filter, then it makes for a very versatile & lightweight travel kit where you don't want to (or can't) take multiple lights over a longer time-frame.

(Unless they've changed the software - if you use the AT, I don't think you can pre-program it to take multiple exposures; you have to tell it to take another photo again and probably nudge the camera along a bit since the object will have moved while the camera body itself stays static).

Cheers,

Vin