ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY: Planets Align With Comet Leonard, Can I Capture It With No Tracking or Stacking?

[Music] all right i don't even know what i'm doing what's up guys welcome to a super dark super rushed and high probability of failure episode all right i'm trying to do three things at once and you all know how that goes so what are we doing we are trying to photograph leonard with zero preparation and zero of the right uh equipment and i can't see [Music] anything oh there i'm like where the heck is okay so what do we got i've got the r6 with my 70-200 f4 so what's going on with leonard leonard is over there he is a comet and um he's very dim he's not like the last comment i saw if you if you guys saw i have three episodes on shooting uh comet neowise that was what was that last year and i got some pretty cool shots out of that that was a way bigger way brighter comment leonard uh is not so big and not so bright maybe that's why they named him lenny oh if you know that book reference ten points for you [Laughter] camera lady definitely knows that book reference which way did he go george okay so what are we gonna do here what i'm i'm gonna do is i'm gonna attempt to shoot this without i didn't have time to set up my uh star tracker or telescope or anything for piggybacking so i'm gonna shoot this with just a tripod and a camera and i'm gonna attempt to walk you through what i'm doing i'm gonna go for a couple of different shots so we have venus right over the borough mountains which is just these three peaks right here that looks really cool and comet leonard is underneath venus about somewhere maybe about i would say it's about one hand under venus i can't see that we can't see it with our naked eye so that's that's uh problem number one is we can't see it i can't see venus so the thing is if you want to do this you you want a fast lens but it's actually kind of bright because the big daytime flashlight just went down over there and then we're looking southwest and that's where the daytime flashlight went down so we're having issues there with it being really bright but just dark enough to screw me over so venus is getting really bright and i'm gonna go with 72 this is the rf 7200 f4 f4 f4 f4 say it again my voice is being weird uh so i'm gonna try to get a couple of tight shots and there is somebody else out here holy cow we are in the middle of nowhere right now and there is someone else driving on this random dirt road they'll be gone in a second anyway so 7200 f4 um what that's going to allow me to do is i'm going to take a few shots and stack i'm not going to do a whole lot but i am going to do a few and see if that helps it's going to take some effort to bring out any detail in leonard um it's going to be tricky but i'm also want to shoot some wide shots so if nothing else what i want to get is like a cool astro shot of we have like an alignment of the planets right now so we have to the southwest we have venus and then we have saturn and then we have jupiter and they're kind of jupiter is way up there but i think i do i have my rf-16 uh my rf 16 millimeter which i did a video on how that does for astro if you want to check that out i have my rp with my 16 to 35 f4 time lapsing over there and i'm going to try to do i have my 85 f2 so i'm gonna try to mix it up and do some wide shots and at least get something cool uh from something i don't know i want something tonight but you guys might just be watching me fail so what are we going to do we only have that's the other problem is the comet is setting at 6 30 it is 5 46 so i don't have much time so i'm going to start exposing in the area that i want and just seeing what i can see so i'm going to start with putting this to infinity and i'm going to do that by using venus because venus is super bright right now and i'm going to focus on it all right so here's what we're looking at on the back of the screen we have uh the burrow mountains that i was telling you about which look kind of tiny from this distance uh we have hopefully some clouds going away this dot in the upper top third center is venus so if we drop a little bit below so if we drop a little bit below venus that's where uh leonard is going to be but leonard is dropping quicker than venus so it's dropping quicker than we're rotating because it's moving much faster than us so this is the composition that i'm going to start with and this is at 70 millimeters so let me switch back into something i don't know what i'm changing okay we're switching back into manual mode i'm at i don't need to be at f16 i'm gonna drop this down to f eight actually i'm gonna just go ahead and go wide open because the longer focal length that you have uh the shorter shutter speeds you're gonna get away with so that's why you want a faster aperture so i'm gonna i don't want movement so i'm gonna try starting it i'm a fifth of a second i'm just gonna bring my if we bring up the exposure too much we're gonna blow everything out so now i'm at iso 1600 at one sixth of a second and i am a little bit apprehensive that i'm going to see anything i'm going to have to darken i'm going to have to darken the sky up it is way too bright that might be it right there it's 554 now and i can't even find it in this i know that i captured it and i know where it should be but with my exposure as it is now i can't even see it i mean the composition looks nice except there's nothing there it's completely nothing there i'm really hoping i'm really hoping that in the next few minutes uh just counting on a little bit more darkness we have darkness across the rest of the sky we also have that's the other problem we also have the giant nighttime flashlight is out and it's a full moon tomorrow so it's like super full right now and it's just like lighting things up on the upside that time lapse is probably going to look pretty nice so this map right here the sky map last time i updated it okay so now we're we're seeing so you guys see venus you see pluto underneath it that's interesting so somewhere above sagittarius is the comet and last time when i was shooting neowise this map updated to where that we could see [Music] the comet it had it on there i don't know if it's going to do that now i'm trying to see if i can select the thingy for it to show up either way it's not showing it but we can see if we zoom out again we can see the line of these planets we have venus saturn and jupiter so i may just try to get a nice shot of that so when you do find the comet it is going to look like a fuzzy star and that might be all that you see initially and it's gonna have a little tail i don't the tail isn't gonna look anything like uh like the other one like neowise did alright so we're gonna change gears for a second because i still can't see anything and i do want to get while there's a little bit of light from blue hour i want to get the remaining bit of the color there and then i want to get a wide shot with the three planets with venus saturn and jupiter and to do that sorry to do that i'm going to use my 16 millimeter the rf-16 2.8 wow i did that really good for not being able to see you know what the one thing i hate about the new rf lenses the cap the rear caps you have to align with the red thingy like oh it's frustrating it is all the frustratings i also lost my lens cap okay so you can see here on the back of the screen we've got venus you can't see saturn and then there's jupiter at 16 millimeter so that's what we're looking at so i'm gonna try to frame this up so the beauty of situations like this and we do have a bit of moonlight is that i can stop down my lens my aperture and i don't have to shoot wide open which for this lens trust me when i say that really helps so that's going to help with the coma and the chromatic aberration which the chromatic aberration itself is not that bad but it is going to help with the coma yeah there is a camera lady just pointed out there is a pack of coyotes that are getting increasingly closer to us all right well i like that a lot so technically i have caught comet leonard it's in that shot but it's so wide that is pretty nice looking shot though it's still like looking straight to the southwest though that's still the really the the brightest part of the sky which is a bummer because that's where the comet is and there's also just a sliver of clouds and they are right where i think the comet is going down so i'm gonna have to start aiming for those clouds and seeing if i can shoot through or around them and catch leonard in there somewhere at a much much longer focal length so i'm going to switch back to the 70 to 200 now i found it i have found leonard wow let me see okay i can't put it in video mode all right there it is so that right there is leonard and remember how i told you it looks like a fuzzy star well that's the fuzzy star sorry my this is from my phone so it's like cracking out so you can see my settings this is just the back of the screen i'm at 51 200 iso 5 seconds f4 that's only so that i can get my composition so that i can see but that is leonard so now that i have it so that was at 70 millimeters um you know what i think that's it right right there that's it wow how cool is that so i'm going to prioritize shutter speed over iso right now because again i'm shooting at 200 millimeters so i'm at a sixth of a second and i could i could do it i could change that and do a longer shutter speed and a lower iso but i would rather have that stability because that's what's going to help the most in making sure that i get the shot and i can just take a bunch of shots at a higher iso and stack them and reduce the iso but if i have a shaky image there's nothing i can do to fix that so let me continue grabbing some shots here while we still have uh we have 6 13 so we have just until 6 30. and then i'm not going to wrap it up here let's go back into the studio and see what i got uh and that'll definitely be after chai time because try time is the most important time after astro time because it's freezing so we have chai time and i'll see you in a second [Music] all right delicious hot tea check so the time lapse died where you saw the time lapse uh a little bit but i had wanted it to run longer than that and get more to a day to night and have venus continue setting but uh again multitasking is like the downfall of my photographic career my photography youtube career so um yeah it died after about 60 of the way that that i wanted the length that i wanted it to go uh but it still came out for a nice time-lapse it was still long enough to be considered a decent time lapse um so i'm happy with that but aside from the battery dying everything looked good it processed well i'm very happy with that so i'm always happy when i get like a decent night time lapse going so let's talk about some of these images so you know i at first i thought that i would need my telescope or a tracker or something set up and with a longer focal length i would have definitely you would you would want that even with the brightness i would have been able to [Music] do much longer exposures with a longer lens and then i could have even you know brought something like the 500 or this you know my 800 or i could use my telescope telescopes probably a little overkill i don't know telescope is like uh 1250 i think my telescope's not that it's not that big um it's a travel telescope but for the longer stuff like that having the piggyback on the telescope or um or using the star tracker or something would have given me a lot different of a shot but in those cases i wouldn't have had any foreground at all and for this you know especially because we had the aligning of the planets that's kind of the look that i was going for i definitely wanted um just a more landscaping more artistic looking image and not just the comet in the sky which i've done before i did that with a closer shot i think at 500 millimeters 400 or 500 millimeters of comet neo-wise and i thought that came out pretty well um i was happy with that but you know again the photographer in me i want to do something a little different i wish i would have had a better foreground i just didn't have time to get anywhere and i'm lucky that i had this area that's close to me in a dark sky area but i didn't have any time to get anywhere more interesting so i might try that again the comet's gonna be visible i think for the rest of the year for another couple weeks but uh it's gonna be getting lower and lower every night so it's gonna be hard and the problem is the lower gets the horizon the fainter it's getting so that's gonna so that's gonna make it a little challenging to continue to photograph and also for me the weather like the clouds i had just amount just the right amount of the wrong clouds in the wrong place and the entire sky everywhere else not not a cloud anywhere to the east to the north to the west but right to the southwest i had just enough clouds to make it kind of a pain that being said though i did get a couple of shots i got this shot with the 70-200 at 200 millimeters so and i was just barely able to frame you can see obviously venus and venus came out really nice i think i think it rendered really nice with the 7200 f4 and then with the little bit of clouds causing you know the lighting effect there that you're seeing so that one was pretty cool and then we can step back a little bit and we can see this image and by stepping back i mean stepping back with the focal length so this image is at 70 millimeters with the 7200 so all the way backed out on that lens and it's pretty cool i didn't want to do too much i actually didn't edit these very much at all other than some uh you know preset local adjustments that kind of thing and then we can back it out all the way to this image which was shot on which was shot on my rf 16 millimeter 2.8 and again the comet in the lower third here is really subtle but i kind of like it as just an image overall i wanted the comment i wanted leonard right there on that third so it kind of helps balance the image out and then we've got venus right almost dead center and then way up here we have jupiter and saturn so you can saturn is really hard to see it is there but venus and jupiter really stick out and that's the alignment of the planets all with a foreground albeit not the most interesting foreground uh and dark skies i think overall this set of images are from 16 to 70 to 200 is i'm kind of happy with it that's about i think the best i could do definitely on short notice and with no tracker and no long lenses but you know i've seen a lot of people i've had a lot of people ask me with comments before and recently you know dming me and comments and stuff asking like hey can we photograph the comet leonard without any special things and yes you can this is the kind of stuff that you're probably going to expect though and also i should mention that the three images here that i just showed you guys none of those were stacked or tracked so those are all single images and i think that is definitely a realistic goal for a lot of people out there who don't have a lot of stuff so you know over the next couple weeks if you want to give this a try just keep it in mind the worst thing that's going to hurt your photography and your like mental state of being is your attitude towards what's expected and what you can achieve and again like me i i knew that i wasn't going to get anything super amazing amazing definition in the comment and so i switched gears to let's make an overall nicer wider artistic looking image out of this and that goes a long way for me personally to keeping my stress levels down and to not like having my hopes and dreams crushed when i see the results because i know what i'm not able to get that being said though for me personally uh any night under the stars like this out there photographing astrophotography like anything i'm always happy with because being outside at night time in the cold i just it doesn't get any better than that for me personally so the fact that i got a time lapse and three decent images i mean nothing's portfolio worthy but again i don't care about that at all i care about you know this photographing the comment was an excuse for me to get out there and enjoy just being outside under the stars alright that's it i'm going to wrap it up if you guys have any questions about anything that i did concerning how i shot the comment or any of these images or whatever leave those in the comments below and i will definitely answer them hit that like button for me if you enjoy this video because that's the best thing you can do for my channel and i really appreciate it thanks for watching i'll see you in the next one [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Brent Hall

Views: 940

Keywords: astrophotography, comet leonard, comet, how to photograph a comet, new mexico, canon r6, canon rf 70-200 f4, brent hall, photography, vlog

Id: x9MfiODf40U

Length: 23min 36sec (1416 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021