- don’t make your camera the highest thing around. My dome was showing scratches. Eventually I got a nice photo of the inside of a juvenile bald eagle’s talon. A bird’s gonna perch where a bird’s gonna perch. Sacrifice some sky and put a better perch next to it.
- the manual focus cameras seem to be temperature dependent. Maybe get something that can be auto focused or add a heater to control night time lows.
- for long exposure low light work, you may find you get much better pictures in very cold weather. This relates to charge leakage in the sensor. If you decide to try keeping your sensor cold, consider condensation. Maybe have something in there that is colder.
- also for long exposures, the noise in the image from leakage tends to be device pixel specific. You can make a dark view map at a given temperature and use it to denoise your images. You’ll need a shutter though, or do something clever with multiple frames as stars move around to get “darkest sample” or something
I've definitely run into the long exposure heat issues. In my hemisphere, the central part of the Milky Way is best viewed during the summer. In my local part of the hemisphere, its ridiculously hot at that time. Even 20s exposures will be noisy. I have a smaller pelican case that I've punched a hole in for the lens to sit outside the case, and then rigged a bunch of those reusable freezer packs for coolers inside. Then covid happened, and I now no longer have a car. To this day, I haven't taken it anywhere to test it out. Now, I'm really sad that I just realized how long it's actually been since I've imaged the sky. <wipesAwayTears>
Regardiing condensation, if you can make the case kind of air tight, maybe you can either fill it with nitrogen, make a light vacuum, or pre-dry the air inside (I remember some tricks to avoid condensation in underwater cameras that consisted in storing it open in the fridge for some hours or something like that, to have drier air inside, I'll look for that again...)
- don’t make your camera the highest thing around. My dome was showing scratches. Eventually I got a nice photo of the inside of a juvenile bald eagle’s talon. A bird’s gonna perch where a bird’s gonna perch. Sacrifice some sky and put a better perch next to it.
- the manual focus cameras seem to be temperature dependent. Maybe get something that can be auto focused or add a heater to control night time lows.
- for long exposure low light work, you may find you get much better pictures in very cold weather. This relates to charge leakage in the sensor. If you decide to try keeping your sensor cold, consider condensation. Maybe have something in there that is colder.
- also for long exposures, the noise in the image from leakage tends to be device pixel specific. You can make a dark view map at a given temperature and use it to denoise your images. You’ll need a shutter though, or do something clever with multiple frames as stars move around to get “darkest sample” or something