Best camera for night sky, and nature/animal?

[price14]

I'm looking to buy a new camera but need some opinions. I would like to stay under or around $1000. I am mainly looking for something that can take good night sky photos as well as other nature/animal and cityscape photos. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[fmw]

Any camera will do. Just be sure you acquire a sturdy tripod to mate with it. The tripod will be far more important than the camera.

 

[KmH]

How good the photos are that get made with any camera is mostly about how skilled and knowledgeable the photographer is.
For the most part any entry-level DSLR camera (they start at $400 - $450) will do what you want to do.

Nightscape photos require a fairly wide angle lens, a solid & steady tripod and a short enough exposure if you want to avoid star trails.
Nature photos often also benefit from a good tripod and a fairly wide angle lens.
Animal photos generally require some field craft skills and a telephoto lens. The poorer a photographers field craft skills are the longer focal length of a telephoto lens needs to be.
Many animal photographers shoot from a blind and let the animals come to them rather than relying on field craft skills.
If you want make photos of animals as they are moving, like birds in flight (BIFs), you may also want to have a gimbled tripod head.

 

[TCampbell]

I'm looking to buy a new camera but need some opinions. I would like to stay under or around $1000. I am mainly looking for something that can take good night sky photos as well as other nature/animal and cityscape photos. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Night Sky vs. Nature/Wildlife are going to be more about the lens... and just a little about the camera itself. The problem is that the lenses are likely to eat through your budget.

Night Sky

Night Sky shots have tiers or a continuum of difficulty... deep-sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, etc.) being the most challenging and extreme wide-field views of the sky (think "milky way" shots) being the easiest. The deep-sky objects (narrow field of view) require a tracking head (or camera attached to a telescope which is tracking). I'll ignore that topic unless it's what you want to ask about and just stick to the Milky Way shots (what most people mean when they ask about night sky.)

To do night sky photography, you will need a solid tripod. The shutter speed will be set to take very long exposures (often 30-40 seconds) and any vibrations will show up in the image (you won't have "round" stars.) Sometimes hanging some weight on the tripod (often the center column of the tripod has a hook on the bottom to allow for hanging some weight).

The Earth spins (at a rate of about 15 arc-seconds (angular rotation) per second (of time)) and this causes the stars to appear to move from East to West (diurnal motion). This means even with a steady tripod, if the exposure is too long, then the stars will appear elongated just due to the rotation of the Earth. But how long is "too long?" It turns out this depends on the focal length of the lens and the size of the camera sensor.

Most DSLR cameras have an "APS-C" sized sensor. It's about 23mm wide by about 15mm tall. Canon and Nikon cameras that use APS-C sensors have fractionally different sizes, but they're both very close to the same size. There's a generous rule and a conservative rule which was designed for 35mm film cameras but is easily adapted to DSLRs.

The generous rule is to use 600 as the base and divide the focal length of the lens into that value. Suppose I have a 15mm lens. 600 ÷ 15 = 40. That means with a "full frame" digital camera or a 35mm film camera we can leave the shutter open for 40 seconds and still get pretty good looking stars.

But some photographers think that under very close scrutiny they can see some elongation when they use that rule... so they use a more conservative value of 500 instead of 600. When you do a search you'll find people referring to these as the "500 rule" or the "600 rule".

But a DSLR with an APS-C size sensor has a "crop factor" because the sensor is not as large as a full-frame digital sensor or 35mm film. That impacts the time. For Nikon the value is 1.5 and for Canon it's 1.6. You multiply the focal length of the lens by the crop factor.

For Canon it's 15mm x 1.6 = 24
600 ÷ 24 = 25

For Nikon it's 15mm x 1.6 = 22.5
600 ÷ 22.5 = 26.6

You can see the timings come out very close (not enough of a difference to worry about them).

Of course if you use the 500 rule instead of the 600 rule those times will be 20% shorter.

This means you want a lens that can gather AS MUCH LIGHt as possible when the shutter is open AND you also want a very low focal length (so you can keep the shutter open longer).

Rokinon makes some very inexpensive lenses BECAUSE they have no auto-focus and no auto-aperture. They're completely manual. This is fine for any night-scape photographer because the stars are so dim that auto-focus doesn't work on them anyway... and the photographer is always trying to get the lowest possible focal ratio (so you'll manually set that and not worry about auto-aperture). In other words the cost of the lens is reduced by eliminating two features that wouldn't be useful anyway. The optics are actually pretty decent.

If I pick on two examples... one is a 10mm f/2.8 lens, the other is a 24mm f/1.4 lens.

You might think the 10mm is better because the lower focal length allow it to keep the shutter open longer (and it does... 10 x 1.6 = 16 and 600 ÷ 16 = 37.5 seconds). But it's an f/2.8 lens.

If we compare that to the 24mm f/1.4 then it's 24 x 1.6 = 38.4 and 600 ÷ 38.4 = 15.625.

But remember... one of these is an f/2.8 lens and the other is f/1.4. An f/1.4 lens collects FOUR TIMES the light when the shutter is open as compared to an f/2.8 lens. This means it is "as if" we could keep the shutter open four times longer. So if we multiple 15.625 x 4 we get 62.5 seconds!!!

You can see how in this case the lens with the longer focal length (24mm) turns out to collect more light when run to it's maximum exposure time because it's focal ratio is so much lower.

The bottom line is that you must pay attention to BOTH the focal length AND the focal ratio when selecting the lens.

That does bring up the question of framing and composition because a 24mm isn't very wide when used on a camera with an APS-C size sensor. It's only a very very mild wide-angle. So maybe you'd rather have the 10mm lens for composition reasons (and certainly people use these focal lengths -- even at f/2.8 -- successfully.)

These low-cost Rokinon lenses are roughly in the $400-500 price range (depending on which lens and which camera mount they are designed to fit.)

If you toy around with the math... you can quickly see how using longer focal length lenses (which are often not low focal ratio but the ones that do offer low focal ratios are extremely expensive) is not going to work (unless you have a quality tracking mount so that the mount rotates to counter-act the rotation of the Earth.)

BTW, the technical nature of the camera is less important. You want a good sensor... but that's about it. You don't care about how many auto-focus points the camera has (because you won't use them). You don't care how rapid the camera's continuous shooting/burst rate is... because you won't use that either. You get the idea... you're mostly going to use the camera as a completely manual device. You just want a sensor and a low focal-length / low focal-ratio lens.

Wildlife

This is literally just about the most opposite you can get from astrophotography. Whereas astrophotography is all about taking your time and using wide-angle lenses, wildlife typically DOES lean on the auto-focus features, rapid shooting speed, and the use of very long focal length lenses.

Wildlife tends to be shot at a distance. And if the wildlife happens to be birds, the subject is usually small. This implies very very long focal lengths.

While you might be thinking 800-1000mm would be nice (and in some cases it would be), the problem with these extremely long lenses (besides price tag) is that the angle of view is so incredibly narrow that it can be very hard to get your subject in frame. You could be pointed to the spot right next to the animal you'd like to capture and have absolutely no idea with way to point the lens to get them in the frame.

Zoom lenses are especially handy here because it means you can zoom "out", find your subject, and then zoom "in" to get the shot.

Sigma and Tamron both make 150-600mm zoom lenses that are very nice in this regard. Sigma makes two offerings... one is the "contemporary" and the other is the "sport". The "sport" is the higher end version and offers slightly better performance... but that's a $2k lens. The "contemporary" is the more budget-friendly version of the lens... but even that is about $1000!

Do you "need" 600mm worth of focal length? In Canon, you can get the MUCH more budget-friendly (it's an entry-level consumer lens) EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens for about $300 and while the optical quality is nice, the price tag is really nice... but of course it's only 250mm. A few weeks with that may have you wishing you had 600mm. But if it's all your budget will allow... They also have the old version of the same lens, the 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS II. It's optics aren't nearly as good, nor is it's focus motor... but it's only $129 (I had this lens when I first started in digital photography and I gave my copy away to a relative... I wasn't happy with it.)

Conclusion

Two lenses, even if you try to go for budget prices, is going to eat through most of your camera-buying budget. That won't leave you much for a camera body. You can get a very basic entry level body from either Canon or Nikon. You might even want to visit their online stores and check out their "refurbished" camera bodies to save a few dollars (and they come with the same warranty as a new camera. Typically there was never anything wrong with a refurbished camera but the consumer changed their mind, returned it, and now it cannot be sold as "new".)

If you can increase your budget (or modify your requirements... maybe buy that long zoom lens for action wildlife in another year or two) then you can increase what you are able to spend on the camera body.