Lonely Speck talks about the Sony a6000 for Astrophotography

Have you ever thought about using the Sony a6000 for astrophotography? If so, you may be interested to read Ian Norman’s report about using Sony’s best-selling APS-C model for Milky Way and aurora borealis photography in California, Nevada and Alaska.

Although he freely admits the a6000 is no A7s as far as low-light performance is concerned, he feels that for the very reasonable price, it is one of the best options for astrophotography out there at the moment. Above all, he praises the tilting screen, as it helps you to compose your shot, and the manual focus assist that magnifies your image as you turn the focus ring of the lens.

After performing an ISO-invariance test, he discovered that ISO 1600 is the sweet spot on the a6000 for astrophotography, though he states that anything between 1600 and 6400 is quite useable. To quote the article:

It’s is high enough to avoid some of the heavy grain visible at the lower ISOs but low enough that we’re not sacrificing too much dynamic range on the bright portions of the image.

As for lenses, he highly recommends the Rokinon 12mm f/2 manual focus lens because of its fast aperture and wide angle. In a brief moment of self-promotion, he also suggests using Lonely Speck’s SharpStar2 focusing filter to bring the stars perfectly into focus.

You can read the full article on Lonely Speck!

a6000 astrophotography