Canon may be doing an EOS RF camera body for astrophotography

A continuation of the rumor from last week which stated that Canon would release a camera body that is a "head scratcher".  Today, the rumor seems to narrow in focus to suggest that it's an astrophotography camera body.  Canon Rumors suggests this is a CR1 - or basically a low-quality rumor.

While this is certainly nothing new, Canon was first out the door with astrophotography cameras with the Canon 20Da.  It was actually the first Canon camera with some sort of liveview interface.

Canon cameras have long since been a standard for the astrophotography community because of their ease of controllability though USB.  Popular tools such as MaximDL, BackyardEOS do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to image acquisition for astrophotography. 

This doesn't seem to be much of a "head scratch" camera, as it's definitely an understandable niche market that Canon has explored as well as Nikon.

The original rumor suggests that the head scratcher would be that there are no lenses for astrophotography so why release the camera.

Well, that's a little misleading.  The Canon RF 15-35mm 2.8 is supposed to be out sometime soon, not to mention that most astrophotographers would be perfectly content to use EF lenses - or if they are doing deep sky photography, they aren't going to be using any camera lenses but will be mounting the camera on a telescope.

I guess the rationale would be "why do it at all"?

For most astrophotography applications an EOS RPa or something of the sort isn't generally needed because astrophotographers atypically remove the hot mirror filter from the sensor and run with full spectrum cameras.  This allows them to tune the sensor for h-Alpha (which is the common spectrum for astrophotography) but also some of the other bands such as Oxygen III.  The normal 20Da or 60Da filter included a narrow bandpass filter for h-Alpha (656nm) by having a custom hot mirror filter installed in the camera.   

One of our main sponsors, Kolari Vision offers the ability to change any Canon DSLR or mirrorless camera to have such a filter through its Astrophotography conversions, making having a specific astrophotography camera (at generally a higher price) is not really required. 

Of course, if Canon does something a little more unique, and puts in a sensor with a low MP count such as 10-12MP and tunes the hot mirror filter to h-Alpha, then you possibly have a very good low light astrophotography camera that will find a nice place in the market.

Time will tell.