Overheating camera sensor with astrophotography?

4 years 6 months ago #661318 by Adam S
One other quick question for me today.  Can you harm a camera sensor from taking a super long exposure?  

20-30 minutes?


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4 years 6 months ago #662355 by Ozzie_Traveller
G'day Adam

The answer from me is "probably not" - but let me expand a bit

A decade ago I had a Pentax - K10 I think it was - and one of the things I bought it for was the "B" setting, as my Panasonic superzoom cameras did not have a "B" setting. I then found that the Pentax when using "B" did 5-minute exposures okay - but 10 minute exposures were internally destroyed by bleaching of the image ~ could have been a snowstorm! However, when I set it to "continuous x 15 sec, NR=off" operation, it would happily do up to 1000 exposures before the battery went flat. The resulting images were stacked using software to create the star trails that I was after. Now 1000 x 15sec = 250 minutes = 4 hours or so ... clean and beaut images of the stars overhead

Since then the Pentax has gone and I now concentrate on Panasonic mirrorless & superzoom cameras. These have also shot up to 500 continuous images of 10 to 30 seconds with images stacked as above ~ and I have never had any issues with the sensor becoming damaged in any way. Even the little FZ-200 that is my go-to camera will happily shoot 400+ images quite happily until its battery runs out

Hope this helps
Phil from the great land Downunder
www.flickr.com/photos/ozzie_traveller/sets/

Phil from the great land Downunder
www.flickr.com/photos/ozzie_traveller/sets/

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4 years 6 months ago #662510 by Chase Audate
Don't they have special astrophotography cameras made for this sort of long exposures?


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4 years 5 months ago #662718 by Ozzie_Traveller
G'day Chase

"special astrophotography cameras" ... well 'yes' but they often start out with a $20 million pricetag :)

However - many keen astro-togs can bolt a small camera - even a smart-fone onto a decent $2000 telescope with azimuth-guidance geometry and as the telescope follows a target group of stars, the camera keeps clicking away, but building upon a single target ~ thus revealing the beautiful depth of detail and colours that are "up there". Once the images are stacked (after removing any cloudy ones) the remaining images provide a wonderful result

Hope this helps
Phil from the great land Downunder
www.flickr.com/photos/ozzie_traveller/sets/

Phil from the great land Downunder
www.flickr.com/photos/ozzie_traveller/sets/

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4 years 5 months ago - 4 years 5 months ago #662719 by Nikon Shooter

Ozzie_Traveller wrote: "special astrophotography cameras" ... well 'yes' but they often start out with a $20 million pricetag :)


Yes, a 4 chips (9MP) each… liquid nitrogen cooled!

"This is not like commercial CCD camera that you can buy.
It's optimized for very low light it has 4x 9 megapixel CCD
chips in it that record a field of view about the size of the full
moon they're in a vacuum can they're cooled to liquid nitro-
gen temperatures"

From 

Light is free… capturing it is not!
Photo Comments
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4 years 5 months ago #663356 by fmw
Overheating is probably not the real problem.  The real problem is the rotation of the Earth.   Very long exposures will turn the stars into streaks.


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