Astronomy and Live View on KS2

I am really chuffed with my recent purchase of a KS2. Streets ahead of my K10D - which is still a nice camera.
I have a problem with it tho'. My main excuse for buying it was for Astrophotography and it has yielded some very good astro pictures with my 70-250mm zoom. I recently got myself a good (ED) 80mm refractor with 500mm focal length but I am having a problem using live view (which is excellent for normal pics). If I look at the the Moon (through a suitable neutral filter which makes optical viewing ok) the Moon image is burned out and far too bright and fuzzy to focus on. If I focus and lock first on a good bright star (using a focussing mask for extra fussiness) then the Moon Images are fine. How can I control the LV so that it can cope with the fixed f6 of the telescope? There is no aperture control, of course. People with other cameras with LV seem to have no trouble so I guess there must be a setting for it. I have tried all the Modes and they are all as bad as Manual.

Also there seems to be a problem also with finding stars with LV. LV gives me a noisy picture until it manages to recognise stars, at which point it shows them after a few seconds. That's very tiresome and makes setup long winded.

I suspect that I may have fooled around with a control but I can't remember what.

I should be grateful for some ideas about this.

The moon basically requires a normal earthly daylight exposure. It shouldn't need a neutral density filter if exposed with the correct shutter speed. With a fixed aperture lens/telescope, set the shutter speed using the M setting and If it's too bright decrease the shutter speed until it isn't any more. There'll be no ideal exposure as it will depend on atmospheric haze and other factors.
Using auto exposure it will be balancing out all the darkness of the night sky leading to that over exposure.
Also worth trying might be to use the spot metering setting to get the exposure in AV mode, lock the exposure and then recompose the picture to taste!
If you get the image slightly under exposed using raw, it should be possible to correct the exposure in post processing, eg in Photoshop, Lightroom etc. Recovering a burned out image isn't usually successful.
Also, are you using a sensible ISO and not letting the camera auto selecting something daft?

Thanks for that suggestion. I looked at the setting and it was cranked up awful high. I probably did it on a very sunny day and forgot about it (in a tizwaz). As soon as the Moon is visible I will try to take its picture.


Thanks for the comments.
I have no problem with the actual exposure and the filter was a bit of red (grey?) herring. My 'best' with the fixed f6 is around 1/400s which is just what you'd expect for an object in full sunlight. When there's plenty of light (Moon and Solar pics - with appropriate filter of course!!!) I use minimal, ISO but for most star shots and deep space objects I use around ISO 800 and stack perhaps ten exposures. I am learning about this stuff and literally everything has to be right for an image of a Nebula or Galaxy. It has all the problems of normal photography and then you do it in the dark and cold and you probably don't know exactly where you are up there etc. etc.


PS Interesting that you can hardly see any craters 'cos the Sun is shining over our shoulders and there are no shadows visible. An interesting but slightly boring picture if you like craters.

I found the camera will display live view based on the metering mode you've set.
Even if you have your photo settings to fully manual control, the auto metering mode will still apply to live view.

Change to spot metering mode, put the moon in the middle of the frame, and it should display fine then.

The camera exposure is fine. Pictures are not affected by my problem, as I mentioned earlier. The problem was entirely to do with the live view display. Once I cranked that brightness control down the problem went away.

No worries, just pointing this out for anyone else who may encounter a similar issue.

The exposure of the live view screen (not talking about the photo taken, just the image displayed on the rear screen) is governed by the metering mode set.

When set to whole of frame, or centre weighted, the live view moon would be overexposed for me. Changing to spot metering meant I could finally see the moon, and focus peaking/digital zoom to manually focus would be useable.

I was using fully manual mode for the actual photo I was taking (so it didn't matter to me at all how the camera metered) but the metering mode was still important in the use of Live view.