Canon Releases Camera for Astronomers

People exploring the Canon official website may run upon a certain new entry on the products section: the EOS 20Da digital SLR camera.

As opposed to the majority of consumer cameras that follow a sort of standard feature set, this particular device is more specialized.

Sure, it still has everything it needs for people to do all the common point and shooting/recording, but that is beside the point.

Long story short, the EOS 20Da is geared towards astronomers, or anyone who likes to shoot photos of the night sky.

An 18-megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor can capture sharp and high-contrast images, which makes stars and whatever else turn up very clear.

There is even an infrared-blocking filter that leads to a hydrogen-alpha light sensitivity about thrice as high as a regular Canon DSLR camera. In other words, the Hydrogen Alpha line (H α wavelength) has a 20% higher transmittance.

Moving on to the rest of the specs, Canon's EOS 20Da can use super-telephoto EF lens and can attach to a telescope.

In fact, the Silent Shooting feature eliminates shutter-induced vibration when mounted in such scenarios.

Also, full manual controls permit images to be captured in RAW, JPEG, and RAW+JPEG formats, while a 3-inch Vari-angle Clear View LCD serves for previewing the shots (1,040,000 make it easy to focus). Furthermore, the ISO sensitivity is of 100 to 6,400 (expandable to 12,800).

Other specs include a 63-zone dual layer metering system, a self-cleaning sensor unit, various recoding functions (card access indicator, read error warnings displayed on the viewfinder, card formatting), simultaneous recording of RAW and JPEG and the ability to select between sRGB and Adobe RGB color spaces.

For those who want to get the complete lowdown, the product page has everything anyone could ever need to know.

Unfortunately, sales haven't started yet, but they will soon, this month in fact (April, 2012). The price is $1,499 / 1,135 Euro.

Posted in: Camera, Preview