First Light

While hiking recently, I had a small accident, where I stumbled and managed to drop my camera with my large telephoto lens attached. Initially, It seemed that I had lucked out, as the telephoto lens was undamaged, but the following day, I discovered that the Nikon D500 camera body had stopped working. This turned out to be an opportunity to purchase a new camera body. I decided to go with the new Nikon mirrorless Z6 body, along with the ZTF lens adapter, which allows me to use my existing camera lenses.

When astronomers set up a new telescope, the initial images collected are known as first light images. I've been getting to know my new camera body and these are some of the "first light" images I've collected.

So far, I'm pretty pleased with my new camera body. A couple of quick observations:

1) Overall, the auto-focus with my large telephoto lens seems to work better with the new Z6 body than my late, departed D500 body.

2) There's a slight lag when I bring my eye up to the eyepiece with the Z6, as it isn't an optical viewfinder, but a display that turns on when it detects the eye , so I'm getting used to that when composing a quick action shot.

3) The Z6 has a single memory card slot (XQD format), rather than the dual memory slots (SD & XQD) for the D500. So far, the XQD card has worked well and seems to transfer files at the same rate as my SD cards.