A7 Lens Control for Astrophotography

[ispybadguys]

I don't know if this is the right forum to ask this on but I use my Sony A7R4 for astrophotography and I have an assortment of Sony lenses that I use. This requires remote camera control for which I use gphoto2 which works great with one exception. Focusing on star fields is extremely difficult and the focus shifts with temperature as the camera cools but there are tools available to do establish and maintain focus. Sony's camera implementation supports remote manual focus however you can only adjust the focus by 1 to 7 steps in the in and out direction. This thwarts all of the autofocus tools as they usually do a focus sweep, calculate the best focus, and command a return to the best focus position based of star size measurements. This is all done with relative focus moves however the A7 ignores any command that moves the focus more than 7 steps and therefore the autofocus routine fails to find the best focus when the software commands a move to the best focus position and that position if farther than 7 steps away from the last measurement.

My question is can Sony modify the camera software so that the camera would accept say a range of +128 to -128 steps in focus. This would make everything work and probably have no impact on any other users.

Thanks

Kurt