Beginner Astrophotography: How I Photographed the Orion Nebula WITHOUT a Star Tracker or Telescope

hi everybody dj here welcome to my first ever photography tutorial on youtube where today's video is going to focus on astrophotography so the plan is to get outside later tonight with my mirrorless camera setup and aim for the orion nebula so what exactly is the orion nebula so a nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust and gases such as hydrogen helium and the orion nebula is situated in the orion constellation in the orion sword which is below the orion's belt the orion nebula is estimated to be around 1350 light years away from earth and is actually estimated to be 24 light years wide now to put that into context one light year is equivalent to six trillion miles so it's an absolute mind-boggling distance away and to be able to see that with your naked eye in light fluted areas is really really crazy it just shows how bright an object the orion nebula is so i live in a city centre in southern england and the light pollution level is classed as a bortl eight on the bortle scale so that's towards the very high end of light pollution city centre deep space photography can be quite challenging there are methods to be able to reduce the light pollution effect on your images once you get onto your computer so i'll show you some of those so it's currently mid-february we're forecast for clear skies fingers crossed as we haven't had clear skies in a very long time it seems and it's actually the new moon tonight so that's the phase of the lunar cycle where the the moon is invisible in the sky and there's no light reflecting off the moon so that allows you to really hone in on some deep space objects with minimal light interference from from the moon which is actually kind of the astrophotographer's dream dream conditions so it's forecast for zero percent cloud cover tonight i'm optimistic it should be it should be good so let's go outside i'll build build by rig and i'll explain what equipment i'm using so for this challenge one of the most important pieces of equipment i am going to use tonight is a solid sturdy tripod any camera wobble at all will render the images taken tonight next to useless the camera i'm going to use today is my nikon z6 which is a full frame mirrorless camera which is great in low light situations you can get into astrophotography with any dslr or mirrorless camera with full manual control over the settings the lens i'm going to use tonight is the first gen tamron 150 to 600 variable aperture lens which is not native to my camera i will need to use an ftz adapter to convert it to my z6 camera body without a star tracker i'm going to be limited to close to one second exposure times as the aperture of this lens particularly towards the 600 millimeter focal length is pretty slow and not at all geared towards astrophotography if i can get any results out of this lens at all i'm going to be really pleased now i am using a really cool app called stellarium which is helping find out which direction to set the camera up the orion nebula also known as messier 42 or m42 is this cluster here underneath orion's belt in orion's sword orion is going to move from south to west in the northern hemisphere which is conveniently where my garden faces so i should have plenty of imaging time tonight clear skies prevailing ideally for astro you will need fast glass such as an aperture of f 2.8 or faster to let in as much light as possible i'm going to be in between f5 to 6.3 with this lens which is not optimal but definitely not impossible due to how windy it is i'm going to attach some lockdown acquired dumbbells to help weigh down the tripod and further lower the centre of gravity for the payload it's about time they got used and that's all the equipment you need i'll head back inside now where i'll discuss astro techniques while waiting for nightfall so astrophotography is a particular type of long exposure photography so that's where the shutter on your camera is open for a long amount of time to let in as much light as possible to hit that camera sensor now the problem with that is as you are taking the photo the earth is slowly rotating which causes the night sky to rotate as well which causes star trailing in your photos so that is why you can't take too long a photograph without that blurring in your photo now you can buy star trackers which attach to your tripod which rotate in time with the the earth's movement which causes your lens to stay static essentially in relation to the to the sky that allows you to take long exposures of 30 seconds plus three minutes you name it and that's where your really detailed shots of deep sky come from i don't have a star tracker so what i've having to do is take really short exposures and take lots of them and stitch them together on my computer to generate final image so hello and welcome to my back garden i'm just finished setting up and i'm positioned in place to start taking some photos so you can just see here we've got the orion's belt at the top and this cluster down here is where the orion nebula is so if i what i need to do is make sure that on the side i have it set to manual focus i do and i want to make sure that image stabilization is off so i'll switch that off there okay so it sounds counter-intuitive uh having image image stabilization turned off um but because we want the photo to be as stable as possible but actually in this instance we don't want the computer in on board helping us with that we want to be purely dialing in manual focus we don't want the computer to adjust for slight different movements in the sky anything like that so next thing i need to do is focus in on the nebula to make sure that the shot is in focus so to do that i'm going to zoom in as close as i can 10 times and then you focus in on a star like such and you just focus turn the focus ring slightly and the aim is to make that as pin point as possible like that so if you can see if i go too far it starts getting too big again so we want to narrow in on that range we let the camera steady for a second and i think that's good so it's really important that the tripod is as stable as possible like any slight wind movement at all um will cause some blurring in the in the stars which is not what we want we want them to be as crisp as we can to so that when we stack them together we get a really clean final image um that's why as you saw in the rig build earlier i've got weights attached to to the tripod to help try and keep its center of gravity lower and may stop any light breeze from uh impacting the shot okay so occurring so one second exposure i'm focused how i want to be going to interval time shooting i've got it set at let's do 200 seconds this is going to take until um nine o'clock so set that together and we'll hit start so it's not been quite a clearing night as i'd hoped um but we'll we'll see what we can get i'm gonna my plan is to experiment with a couple of different ranges so i've currently got this at 150 millimeters it's a 150 to 600 millimeter lens so hopefully um i can get some good shots across that board but because it's a variable aperture um if i go towards a 600 millimeter end i'll have to go to f 6.3 uh which might be a bit too bit too slow for the enough light to hit the sensor um but we'll see what we can get i have tried a couple of shoots before and i think iso 1600 works quite well with this camera um so we'll see see what we can get so whilst this is going it's going to take about 10 minutes i'm going to get a cup of tea and i'll join you back out here so as you can see the ryan's belt has now shifted across the sky because it's been about 15 minutes since i started started shooting so what we need to do now is to move the tripod and refocus definitely important to make sure we refocus on a distant star and reframe the the shot how we want to before we set it off on another batch of another 200 shots so to do that i'm just going to turn the tripod as such we've now got yes now we've got the belt in the shot and the maybe the as well so if you're wondering the red headlamp is to be able to help my night vision and so i could have it on a white bulb but that would adjust my eyes and i wouldn't be able to see the sky as well as i can and that will impact my focusing so red headlamps are really useful gear to be able to see see in the dark so now that it's re-centered again and i'm it's as close as focuses i'm going to get without without a special tool um which is a lens cap that you put on the front of the camera and it will cause like a star-like pattern in in the stars which is how you know you've achieved perfect focus they are pretty cheap uh so i'm gonna buy one from amazon but lead times are about a month so um by the time the next new moon comes along i might have all the gear and a little bit more idea so let's kick this off okay so on here so we've got i can choose to start it second so the interval is how many seconds it waits in between taking each frame so i've set this to two seconds so it'll take a photo for one second wait two seconds take a photo for one second it's good to have that interval because otherwise the camera memory buffer will back up and you might lose some shots it will cause cause your camera to run a bit bit warmer and overall impact performance so let's go and click start it's about minus four i think in my garden at the moment so and the weather site said it feels like -10 and i believe it so i'm gonna go in and get a cup of tea and i'll come back out okay so i've finished shooting now i've got a good thousand dollar photos across the the 150 to 600 focal range um a couple of different iso settings and i am frozen to the bone and i'm i'm going to head back inside so um i'll bring the photos into the studio and we'll have a look at post processing so thank you for watching and we'll see you back inside calibration frames are special photos that you also take alongside images of the night sky that allow you to help reduce noise in your final image so noise is digital interference essentially in your in your photo so it could be hot pixels from your camera running hot it could be dust on your lens you name it things that are not in the image but will appear in the final frame so what we can do there is take calibration frames such as bias frames which are essentially where you take 40 to 50 photos with your camera lens cap on in a very dark room and with your shutter speed at the highest it can go so on the nikon z6 that's 1 8 000th of a second for example then there are flat frames which is when you've come in from your imaging session outside you can you need to do it straight away put a white t-shirt over the top of your camera lens and a bright white light source into the lens and take 40 to 50 photos of that then there is also what we call dark frames which is when you're out in the night sky taking photos you put the lens cap on and take 40 to 50 dark frames as well so we've got the bias frames the dark frames the flat frames all called calibration frames which we use to help eliminate noise from the sensor and that in collaboration with the 750 photos i took of the orion nebula i'm going to stick them all together into the deep deep sky stack of software and we'll see what the final image looks like okay so let's get started the example i'm currently running for in deep sky stacker is actually my collection of 25 images at 600 millimeters that i took which in real time actually took around 10 minutes for its process the image i plan on taking into photoshop however will be the image generated from the 750 photos i took earlier at 300 millimeters at 1600 iso which took around three hours of real-time processing and deep sky stackers so i decided not to record that bit for you the setup however is exactly the same so to start with we're going to click the open picture files at the top left hand corner of my screen which is where we're going to add our light frames or the images of the night sky we are then going to step through and add our calibration frames so the dark frames the flat frames and the offset or bias frames once we have added all of our photos we're going to click check all and then register checked pictures which lets the tool know we've added everything in so this is a really clever piece of software which does things i'm not even going to pretend to be able to understand so i like to use the recommended settings where the software will work look at the images that i've uploaded and will suggest the means of stacking to me so i'll click on recommended settings and scroll through and look for anything there where it suggests a different setting so here is using a median combination method i click that click ok make sure that it's got all three ticked and now here i'm going to look through the star detection threshold which initially says that it found 28 stars in my frame i'm going to try and look up that threshold and we'll see how many finds this time 16 which is not very good so i'm going to put it back down to 5 and then click ok so my total exposure time is 25 seconds so 25 one second photos and it says it's going to take 3.8 gigabytes of data on my drive now you need to be really careful with this because when i was going to do my 750 photos that was going to take 100 gigabytes so i had to do a lot of cleaning out to make room for that so as i mentioned earlier this took around 10 minutes of real-time processing but i've kindly cut that out of the video and this is what you'll be faced with once you stack them all together now it really doesn't look like much but there is so much data in that image that once you take it into photoshop you can manipulate it and you'll be able to reveal the orion nebula using some clever tricks which i'm now going to show you so the main bulk of the processing which reveals the most detail is called stretching where i am adjusting the levels of the highlights shadows and mid-tones of the image i will do this multiple times in small increments being careful not to over stretch the image which can clip or lose data lowering the image's quality the way that camera lenses are designed means that the center of the frame tends to be the sharpest and most detailed as we stretch the image vignetting will occur which causes the quality of the image at the edges to suffer so i like to crop in the image a little which also helps show off the orion nebula as the subject the next technique i am using is one to attempt to reduce the light pollution from the image to do this i have duplicated the photo into a new photoshop project where i'll remove the nebula using the dust and scratches filter under noise on the filters tab the aim is to turn this layer into a background gradient which in this image is a pretty awful greenish colour i use the healing tool to adjust a few really bright spots left by the nebula then i will return to the main image and use the apply image technique where i select for it to subtract the light pollution layer i decide to not go too aggressive with this as it could take out too much information and ruin the images it's hard to cut down a couple of hours worth of photoshop into a two minute time lapse if you're interested in a more long format tutorial i highly recommend other youtubers astro backyard and nebula photos who've taught me so much they have great content which have really helped me develop i would love to see what they could achieve using my 750 photos for final smaller adjustments i actually prefer to use adobe lightroom where i have a lot more experience it's at this point where i start to manipulate the colors to bring the image to life and after a few attempts this is my final result which i i'm really proud of for a hobby i'm only just scratching the surface of using a lens that honestly shouldn't have been capable i think i've done a pretty good job and i can't wait for the next clear sky to try again [Music] so thank you for watching i hope you really enjoyed today's video if you did please feel free to leave a like and maybe subscribe to my channel for more videos like this and at this point i'd like to give a huge shout out to fellow youtuber d menglo who i borrowed the tamron 150 to 600 millimeter lens from on a try before you buy a kind of basis so if you're interested in drone footage landscape cinematics all kind of good things like that i highly recommend checking out d menglo's channel there will be a link in the description below thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed today's video i hope you learned something new hopefully you've even gained a passion for for space that you didn't realize you had so if you did enjoy today's content please do give me a thumbs up like the video ring that notification bell if you're at all bothered and if you're interested please do subscribe to my channel for future related photography content i've got some big plans coming up so until next time take it easy you

Channel: David Scott John

Views: 4,351

Keywords: Orion Nebula, orion nebula photography, astrophotography, dslr camera, mirrorless camera, deep sky stacker, photoshop, photoshop editing, lightroom editing, deep sky objects, photography tips, photography ideas, photography, skyguider pro, star tracker, star tracker astrophotography, telescope, telephoto lens, space, astrophotography tutorial dslr, nikon z6, tamron 150-600mm, dslr astrophotography, orion nebula, constellations, astrobackyard, nebula photos

Id: ZYZMZzQnQo0

Length: 21min 21sec (1281 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021