Hand held astrophotos

Camera tech is constantly improving. At some stage, you just have to buy in and lock yourself to that year/months tech level and go with it.
This is what I did some 7 years ago with the Canon 5D Mk2. In good light it’s still more camera than I can manage, but is really starting to show its age in others.

One of my (many – shut up all of you!) interests is astrophotography. Specifically landscape star shots.
(I have been down the rabbit hole of telescope based astrophotography and found my pockets are just not deep enough for that thread – besides, when it came to sharing, I found my circle to be more receptive to seeing land and stars rather than just deep stars and fuzzy blobs).

All this came to front again with the Grand Canyon raft trip. Its been years (and years and years) since I have been under such dark skies.
It was a real joy to walk around camp at 2am by nothing more than starlight.

I digress.

The latest cameras have such good image stabilization tech that it seems possible to take photos of the Milky Way with no tripod.

https://petapixel.com/2017/05/19/can-shoot-milky-way-hand-held-olympus-e-m1-mark-ii/

When it comes to optical image stabilization, it seems like nothing comes close to touching Olympus’ OM-D E-M1 Mark II. As one photographer recently discovered, the 5-axis optical stabilization is so good, you can actually shoot the Milky Way hand-held with this monster

The Mitakon lens is manual focus, so I set up to focus using the viewfinder zoom on the brightest object in the sky. I calculated the settings to be best at ISO 12800, f/0.95, with 4 seconds.

Nice. But I really need to spend some money on a better drone camera than a GoPro.