3 EASY ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY Targets for Beginners!

hi everyone this is Trevor Jones from astrobackyard.com and in this video I'm going to show you three of the easiest astrophotography targets and exactly how you can capture them for yourself I'll set up a basic affordable deep Sky astrophotography kit here in the backyard and walk you through the process of capturing all three objects that's right two nebulae and one star cluster in one night these are some of the most rewarding deep Sky objects you can take a picture of in the entire night sky and will do it all with an entry-level basic DSLR camera and lens astrophotography as a whole is pretty difficult but these three targets are nearly foolproof and I'll explain why because sometimes you just need to go for the sure thing foreign [Music] so what makes these deep Sky objects easy anyway well as you may have guessed one of the most important factors is that all three of these objects are bright the bottom line is brighter nebulae in galaxies are easier to find and capture in the night sky this is true even from a dark sky location but especially important from a light polluted backyard in the city another reason that these particular targets are so approachable and easy is that they don't require any specialized filters or an astro modified camera to do justice those will help for sure but some of the best examples I've seen of these three targets were shot with an ordinary stock DSLR camera just like this one so what are the targets here we go the three beginner level deep Sky objects I recommend can be captured right now or if you're watching this video a little later in the winter they are the Pleiades star cluster the Orion Nebula and the rosette nebula each of them have their own challenges to consider but they are all bright colorful and very rewarding to capture using entry-level gear the Pleiades is a star cluster with some super bright stars and some included wispy blue nebulosity surrounding it overall it's one of the easiest deep Sky objects to photograph in the night sky but those Bright Stars can be tricky to get right in the image processing stage of things next up we have the Orion Nebula I'm sure many of you have heard of this one before this nebula is so bright you can see it with the naked eye it's easy to find and there are plenty of bright stars within the field of view to help you focus your camera lens and align the object the intense Luminosity of the Orion Nebula make it easy and approachable to photograph but capturing the full dynamic range of this very bright Target will keep you busy well into your intermediate and advanced level stage of your astrophotography journey lastly we have the rosette nebula it's not too far from Orion but a little harder to find this object involves a beautiful cluster of stars with a symmetrical flower of nebulosity around it it's a real fan favorite for good reason okay let's talk about the equipment I'm using tonight to photograph these three objects and how you can build a similar setup for projects like this even though these objects are very bright you'll want to make use of tracking to capture them in full detail whether that's a portable star tracker like this one here or an equatorial telescope Mount this will allow you to record the long exposure images needed for a detailed shot in terms of Optics a telephoto camera lens like this one or a small telescope in the 300 to 400 millimeter range is ideal the camera can be any modern DSLR or mirrorless camera the one I'm using tonight is one of the cheapest entry-level DSLR cameras Canon makes the rebel t7 it's a stock crop sensor DSLR and you can pick one of these up brand new for about 400 bucks to make things a little easier on your neck I recommend going for the t7i version of this DSLR if you can with the flip out screen this one can be a little awkward especially when your target is straight up attached to the camera is an old Canon EF 300 millimeter F4 I purchased this prime lens used many years ago for about seven hundred dollars this lens isn't perfect by any means but it uses some quality glass and it mimics the telescope experience at least in terms of focal length aperture and size the star tracker again one of the most affordable options available is the skywatcher star Adventurer this allows me to match the apparent rotation of the night sky and take longer exposures than I could on a stationary tripod accessories include a remote shutter release cable to automate a series of exposures and a cheap lens warmer just to keep that lens from frosting over throughout the night oh and a piece of electrical tape but I'll explain what that's for later as you can see I've got my kit set up here in the backyard and the location I chose was keeping in mind the location of Polaris the North Star and where my intended deep Sky targets will appear in the night sky later on all polar align the star tracker using the North Star and this is best done at dusk right around now because only the brightest stars and planets appear in the night sky everything gets harder in the dark trust me the process involves looking through the polar scope on the star tracker and adjusting the left right up and down or alt as adjustment bolts on the mount you can use a free app on your phone to guide you in the right direction it's simply a matter of fine-tuning the placement of Polaris through that polar scope to match the reference image shown on your phone screen once the star tracker is polar aligned it's very important that we don't knock it out of alignment by accidentally kicking the tripod leg if this happens you'll have to Polar align all over again this part of the process is absolutely critical to get right thankfully all three objects were photographing tonight are very bright and obvious to find in the night sky this means we can skip over some of that time and frustration that manually locating a deep Sky object in the sky can cause I'll start by pointing my camera and lens towards the Orion Nebula this one has the added benefit of having several Bright Stars within the field of view of the target to help me Focus that camera lens when we're done with this target I can hop over to the next one and our Focus will be pretty darn close to perfect when we do that as long as we've managed to keep that Focus held in place and that's where the tape comes in a very low-tech solution that works great if you're really having a hard time focusing on the target even the Orion Nebula you can use an even brighter star like Sirius or a bright planet or even a distant Street Lamp I'll talk more about focusing in a minute but first I want to go through the camera settings I'll use to capture these objects the exact camera settings I use are nothing special and a variation of these settings could really be applied to almost any astrophotography project however if low light photographer is still something new to you there's a few key things to keep in mind the big ones are using manual or bulb mode to tap into some of those longer exposure times using a low f-stop to gather plenty of light and a higher ISO setting than you're probably used to using for example tonight I'll take 90 second exposures at ISO 3200 at F 5.6 the type of Optics you're using might limit that aperture setting I could shoot at F4 with this lens but I know that the Stars will tighten up if I stop down right on cue the Canada geese polar molar don't poop on me you can shoot with your lens wide open to gather the maximum amount of light but I think you'll find that with a lot of these lenses they perform better one or two stops down an ISO setting of 3200 is high yes but a lot of the noise we see in a single sub exposure will be reduced when we stack the images later I'm not going to lie the process of focusing the lens on a bright star can be a little finicky the best advice I have for focusing on a star is to use the Live View mode on your camera and zoom in 10 times when you focus back and forth on that star you may notice that it has a purple Fringe that turns to a green Fringe as you go in and out try to find this sweet spot where most if not all of that color goes away and then tape it down okay my camera and lens are pointed at the Orion Nebula now and I've taken my first two or three 90 second exposures I ended up bumping that ISO setting down to 1600 from 32 it was a bit bit aggressive where it just totally blew out Orion so judging by the histogram this will put the data more in the center so I think these are the best settings using the remote shutter release cable I set a sequence of a 190 Second exposures to fire off on their own with a 10 second Gap in between [Music] okay I'm back in the garage now and reviewing my images after a full night of capturing these three deep Sky Targets this should give you a great idea of what your images should look like at this stage or maybe even better if you're fortunate enough to be shooting from a dark sky location just something to note here I ended up shooting all of the images at ISO 800 instead of 1600 like I planned at 90 seconds at F 5.6 at 1600 they were just a little washed out especially with the Orion Nebula so I ended up with ISO 800 and used that for each project after that here you can see some of my image frames some look better than others which is totally normal but overall these look really really good I was able to focus the lens pretty well and I don't see too much color fringing either so that's a testament to the quality of this particular lens I'll also say that lining up Orion and the Pleiades was you know quite easy because they're so bright and those bright stars in the field of view up the rosette was not I had to do some serious star hopping to find the rosette and that's simply because the cluster of stars within this object are bright and I could see them in the live view but to Center the object I had to take several test exposures to get those lined up so this is something that I'm used to doing I've done for many years the star hopping and test exposures but something to consider it's a lot harder to get that rosette centered than it was for the Pleiades and Orion I aim to capture about an hour on each Target which is enough integration to create you know a respectable image but really very short overall integration in terms of what you would normally do for a deep Sky astrophotography project you normally want to capture much much more data than that and don't hop around from three objects on a single night stick to one project and get as much exposure time as you can my battery on the camera died in between shooting the Pleiades and the rosette so I had to take a one hour time note to charge the battery while the camera continued to track on the object I popped it back in and then was able to continue collecting sub-exposures on the rosette nebula here's the rosette here you can see it's very subtle if you didn't know that this is the exact area and what to look for you wouldn't even really know that the rosette is in there I can just barely see it so out of the three Targets this one is by far the most difficult as we review the image data you may notice that some exposures look better than others some of them have pinpoint perfect stars and other ones have slight trailing this is totally normal and for a star tracker at a 300 millimeter lens this is really good essentially we'll end up stacking about the best 75 to 80 percent of our image exposures and we'll just remove those ones where the tracking wasn't perfect if we did want perfect stars in each and every exposure we could use something like Auto guiding which you can do on this Mount but that adds complexity and cost to this rig and I wanted to keep it simple okay we're in deep Sky stacker now which is a free Windows based image stacking calibration and integration software and it does a great job considering all the paid tools that are available for this process this one continues to deliver great results and it's free so you can't beat that we're just looking at some of the 90 second exposures of the Orion Nebula here and you can see some of the ones that just don't look great right out of the get-go let's see here's a good one nice Stars the one right next to it not as good deep Sky stacker has this scoring feature where you can actually run it through the registration process and it will rate each image in terms of quality of the Stars the sky brightness and a few more things so to do that I'll select all of my light frames check all and register checked pictures and when we run this it's going to give them all a score and then we can you know use this tool to better judge which photos are good enough to stack for our final image and which ones we should just leave out okay here we go and we can see right away some of the ones with a terrible score that we know we can remove right away all these light frames that are a zero see what they look like yeah some horrible horrible tracking going on there so we'll get rid of these ones and then as we go up look at the scores for the top one 4404 this is a really nice sharp sub compare that to say a 299 we're gonna see it's much worse tracking on there so I'll just get rid of the worst you know it looks like maybe 20 25 even and then what we're left with that one looks pretty good so that's our lowest score 1201 with our highest 4404 improve but I'll still keep it so we're left with 26 light frames and I'll check all of those and now I'll just add my dark frames so I took 15 darks here and again we can confirm that the same exposure length oh I've got one one second that's stuck in there a minute and 30 seconds ISO 800 we're good to go so I'll check all of our files here and this time instead of registering the check pictures I'm going to stack them so pretty well the default settings here are in place with the with deep Sky stacker here's my settings here if you want to mimic them it should be pretty well default from out of the box when you get deep Sky stocker Sigma clipping median combination bilinear debaring good to go and it looks like we'll end up with a 39 minute total exposure I'll just click OK and it's going to magically stack these image frames these light frames with our darks and create a master file for us to play with in Photoshop which is where we're going next all right we've got our final stacked image of the Orion Nebula and Running Man nebula stacked here in deep Sky stacker and now we'll open this up in Photoshop to really start having some fun so here's the Stacked image here I haven't done anything to it yet this is what it looks like out of the box so you know if you've seen these finalized pictures of the Orion Nebula this is what it starts from this is a totally normal this is a great looking Master file to start from so everyone has their own taste when it comes to image processing but there are a few things that I think are universally appreciated by by most so we'll we'll do some of those key actions so you can kind of see what I'm talking about so if we look at the image overall the first thing we're going to do in Photoshop is change the mode to 16 bits just so we have some more options to play with it the method here you want to keep to exposure in gamma we don't want to change anything there in the HDR toning so the first thing we'll look at is the image levels we can bring this slider in here we're not clipping in any data by just reducing some of that Sky brightness background looking at it like this we can see more with what we're dealing with we can look at the channels to see what it looks like in each color there's our red our green and our blue everything looking really great there's a lot to cover in terms of the image processing side of things but if you're interested in going in real deep and learning at your own pace you can look at the processing guide in the description and I'll add these Master files for you to practice on these three files that we're talking about in this video so that's an option for you too but there's a few things we can do that are really going to make a difference with files like this one of them is minimizing star size another one one is increasing saturation and the other is just creating more contrast between our object and the sky behind it but before we do that let's just do a simple curve stretch a pretty common action to take in a deep Sky image so if we look at the curves dialog box here and we can see our histogram here's where all our data is sitting if we make a stretch like this we can see some more of the outer nebulosity from Orion starting to appear but we need to be careful not to clip the data on either side and sometimes a nice S curve like this where we pull in the bottom end and then make sure we don't clip that we can start to see more of the Running Man nebula now and we haven't really lost anything so if we go to the before and after look at the difference so another thing we can do is just quickly balance the background Sky to align all the channels using the set gray Point eyedropper tool if I click it here you can see more of a natural color balance of the image already looking pretty cool we can see much more data but another thing we can do is reduce the size of the bright stars in this image to make that nebula pop even more and to do that we can do select color range highlights and then adjust the fuzziness and range sliders so we've really only selected the bright stars and not the nebula itself so if we do something like this you can see those stars are selected with the marching ants around it and I'm just going to manually remove the part of the nebula because we don't want to mess with that so using the lasso tool and the ALT key I'm just going to remove this part here if we collect some of those smaller stars in the area that's fine too then just to refine this mask we can modify and expand it by let's say five so we've captured all the way around the stars and then we will modify and feather just to soften it up around the edges if we want to really see what this mask looks like you can go into select and mask and see how fuzzy that is we can do some real good refinements in here too changing the contrast to really ensure that we're only selecting those Bright Stars there we go and now I'll go to filter other minimum and then it's just a matter of choosing the right radius that's pretty high we'll do a one and you want to make sure that the preserve roundness is selected so why don't we try 1.3 I'm going to run that and you'll see the subtle powerful difference that makes so we've reduced all the stars in the field and suddenly that nebula stands out a lot more if I go back to before this action was done here and now I'm going to click after look at that subtle amazing difference and then we can go in again and continue to play with those curves this time I'm going to hold Ctrl and select one of the areas of color in the nebula and then click control with the eyedropper and click here and you can see it's plotted those two points on our curves graph here on the histogram so now when I pull up this one it's only pulling out those color ranges I've selected and plotted and we're dropping it down from the dark sky area so once we've applied that if we look at the before and after here look at that difference we've we've largely left that background Sky alone but we're continuing to pull out that nebula and we've reduced the star size as you can see quite a difference from that first initial photo again this is just a quick overview of the types of things we do one last thing here we can go into the camera raw filter and we go into basic and we have some really basic sliders to adjust here the saturation the clarity exposure contrast highlights all these things we can play with we can play with the color balance in here a lot of amazing powerful tools to play with in here but this is where you would do a lot of the color adjustments so I'm just going to leave that as is and if we look at the before and after from where we're at now with this image from the Stacked what an incredible difference so I hope you can start to see the direction we're going with these images so I'll go through and do this and much more with all three stacked images and we'll share the final image so you can see what's possible using gear like this a very limited amount of exposure time from a backyard using pretty simple gear okay I can't share my results before saying this 30 to 40 minutes per Target is not enough integration seriously the rosette is barely there but spend a full night on one of these targets and I promise you an incredible photo is possible so do me a favor and go after one of these Beauties and let me know how it goes please [Music] foreign [Music] foreign

Channel: AstroBackyard

Views: 117,760

Keywords: astrophotography, beginner, how to, DSLR camera, DSLR astrophotography, star tracker, camera settings, astrobackyard, tutorial, astrophotography camera, astrophotography setup, astrophotography camera lens, orion nebula

Id: KHaELP7__7M

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023