My Em1 Mkii Settings for Astrophotography 

Very helpful and easy to follow/implement. Thanks.

Panasonic Lumix are set up almost exactly the same. The smaller cameras are lighter on the tripod. They also have the 1 minute exposure interval timer. I've been using GH4, E-M5ii, G7 for a long time, and now the G9. The tiny E-PL7 will also do 1 minute exposure and interval but not as easy to set up. The G9 is something else, with the Leica 100-400 mounted it is essentially a hand-held 800mm telescope (I rarely buy new). The 'Long Shutter NR' is the one that takes dark frames. There are a couple of other NR aboard, maybe three and can take some digging to find. Each Photostyle or Picture Mode has its own NR which can be adjusted; these modes do alter the colour gain even in raw. Then there is a blanket NR, it does not turn all the NR off. The camera NR can be over the top and can remove faint stars but adding a little can remove graininess. The various settings do understand the camera better than most software in post, let the camera do some of the heavy lifting. These a pro cameras, what they can do internally is exceptional. Both breeds are currently using a Panasonic designed LMOS sensor manufactured by Sony. Lumix do use a better heat sink to keep the sensor cool, less noise from heat, Olympus can tinge magenta from long use (this is well hidden in the manual's small print). I shoot raw+jpeg, that way I have a viewable sooc as both Olympus and Panasonic raw present problems to most viewers and and post processors and have to be converted to tiff; I use huge SD-XC cards. Whilst the cameras have a base of ISO 200 they seem to optimise at ISO 400. Fiddling with the highlight/shadow gain curve can aid resolution, as can contrast. Correctly set up Lumix can shoot acceptably over ISO 10,000, so can the E-M5ii, but for astro set ISO 400. With astro the camera metering has to be ignored. All the astro settings can of course be saved to a custom memory slot so next time you just dial it up on the mode wheel. Except for Leica, Lumix GX, and Olympus Pro (and Sigma full alphabet soup), few of the MFT lenses like being shot wide open and need to be stopped down a little to sharpen focus. Olympus now have 'Starry Sky AF' but the GH4 (undocumented firmware update), G7 and G9 have 'Starlight AF', all of which will AF on stars. Starry Sky is a bit different as it will try to take sky rotation out not just focus. If you have ground vibration on your tripod the stabilisation may need to be switched on to take the sting out (tested no-IBIS GH4 and E-M5ii on prime). We have a spring somewhere below the paving, underground water flowing, tripod rubbers knock it out. Focus peaking is pretty useless except on the moon where you will see what a huge depth of field it has, 1700km (auto focus bracketing and stack is interesting); the moon is bright enough (too bright?) to get a good one-shot picture.

Just happened to come across your channel by chance. Very informative for the guys who are just learning the ropes of this most difficult and complex branch of photography. I used to do a lot of widefield long exposure deepsky imaging using dedicated cooled CCDs. Pixinsight was my software of choice for processing. Not done any for a long while. I wonder if this high res shot ( I do have both the EM5 MKii and EM1 MKii ) is an in camera implementation of the good old ' Drizzle ' technique we used to use to correct for the undersampling of the imaging sensors?

If you had to choose, for long exposure deep sky astrophotography, between an astro-modded em1 mark ii vs a (~30%) more expensive stock em1 mark iii, which one would you go for? I can't decide but I'm pulling the trigger on one of these soon.