Can Sony a5 shoot starry sky and aurora, and how to configure it?

Don't shoot the starry sky with Sony's camera, don't shoot the starry sky with Sony's camera, don't shoot the starry sky with Sony's camera, the important thing is to say it three times.

For specific reasons, please refer to "Star Field Photography (Second Edition)" written by Taiwan Province astronomer and astrophotographer Wang Weihao. I happen to have a copy.

I'll give you some excerpts about the shortcomings of Sony camera shooting starry sky. Note 4-2 on page 45:

"In the early days of Sony's Quan Huafu mirrorless models, such as A7 and A7R, when the door B is used, the camera will start HPS, and this function cannot be turned off by the user. The situation is the same as that of early Nikon cameras. The only way to avoid starting HPS is to use M shutter instead of B shutter, but this will be limited by the exposure time limit of M shutter of 3 seconds at most. In order to achieve long-term exposure, it is necessary to accumulate a large number of 3-second exposures, which will only increase the difficulty of subsequent image processing and the amount of files. In addition, when the exposure time of a single sheet is too short, the reading noise will become the main noise source, which makes the image quality under the same total exposure time far worse than the result of a long exposure time of a single sheet.

comparing the results of A7R shooting, long exposure with B shutter (top row) and 3-second exposure with M shutter (bottom row), the total exposure time is similar. It can be seen that many dark stars have disappeared in the image exposed by the B shutter.

later Sony cameras such as A7II and A7RIII weakened this HPS a lot. Therefore, many people on the internet claim that Sony cameras have stopped eating stars recently, but this is not true. If the camera is used with a high-definition lens, you will still see that the star core is filtered out or color transcribed. In addition, in the latest version of the camera firmware, as long as the exposure time is longer than 4 seconds, the star-eating effect will start, which can be said to be completely inevitable. Therefore, I personally don't recommend using Sony cameras to make astrophotography at present. "

this book was published in 219, so the Sony A5 you mentioned must have some shortcomings, and it is not suitable for the starry sky. As for the aurora, I think it can still be filmed.

Wang Weihao also said, "In the world of DSLR (SLR) astrophotography, brands other than Canon and Nikon can only accompany the list".

It is suggested to use special astronomical digital cameras to shoot the starry sky, such as D81A from Nikon and 6Da from Canon. The latter A stands for astronomy. They have no infrared cut-off filter, their sensitivity to red light is much higher than that of ordinary cameras, and their quantum efficiency is very high, so they can capture the beautiful starry sky in a short time of exposure!

in a more professional field, you can use astronomical freezing CCD, which has extremely low noise and high quantum efficiency under long-term exposure. This is also my dream, but I am ashamed.

use manual gear; The starry sky ISO is set above 16, the aperture is the largest, the shutter is 2 to 3 seconds, and the manual focus is infinitely far away and slightly retreated; The orbit settings are similar, but the shutter time is much longer (several or even more than ten hours), and it can be more than ten minutes at a time in Zhang Hecheng.