Deep Sky Astrophotography - Equipment Overview and Setup

hello my name is Nico and welcome to my channel I specialize in deep sky Astro photography especially emission nebula this video is all going to be about how I set up my equipment for a successful night of imaging and I'll also go through each piece of equipment and explain how it works and what it does so this will be a fairly long video but there is a table of contents right below the video here where you can jump to different parts so if you get bored or you just really want to see one specific thing like how to set up the pole master or something like that feel free to skip ahead I understand that my gear will be slightly different than what you might have but I watched a lot of videos on how people set up their mounts and and get ready for an imaging session and I found a lot of good tips in all kinds of different videos so hopefully you'll find some tips in mine as well and one last thing before we get started if you look right below this video there's a link to my website that's a web page that set up specifically for this video that will have links to all the different resources including articles and books and gear that I mentioned throughout this video all right without further ado we can start right here this is my German equatorial mount it's probably the most important part of a deep sky imagers gear collection the reason is is because if you can't track the sky accurately you're not going to have sharp round stars and beautiful details on whatever deep sky object you're trying to photograph so you always want to spend as much as you can afford on the mountain in my case that was the Ryan atlas the atlas is made by a Chinese company called cinta and it is available here in the United States under a couple different names you can find it called the Sky Watcher eq6 my version that was called the Orion Atlas eqg they are making newer versions of this with new features like and they now have ones with belts and different things like that mine's a little bit older I did buy it used locally but I've been using it for two years with a lot of success I really like it I did make two modifications or actually I bought one thing and then made something else I'll show you those real quick here all right the first thing is something I bought right from Orion's website this is the Pier extension the reason I bought this was because a couple reasons actually one it makes polar alignment much easier because you'll see later it makes it just much easier to adjust those things before I had this it was really really tough and almost worthless trying to use the knobs to pull or a line but this has made it a lot better the other reason is it brings the whole mount head including your scope and the counter weights up from the tripod so I can now image further past the meridian than I could before I could actually I can actually image like two hours past the meridian now and so on a lot of nights instead of doing a Meridian flip I just turned that feature off in the software and it just goes right past it which saved some imaging time the other thing I made is this what this is is basically an upgrade to the tripod it's called a tripod spreader and it basically just makes the tripod a lot more stable by having a big base at the bottom that's holding those tripod legs apart you can buy commercial tripods spreaders from like deep-space products they're very expensive though so building this myself saved me a lot of money and I'll include instructions on how to do that on my website actually I didn't write them I found them online and they were perfect they included a link to where to find these little clamps everything so really good instructions on how to make this after the mount the next most important thing and your set up is your imaging train which is this right here this includes your imaging scope your camera your filter wheel if you're using a mono camera and your guiding setup if you use one this is all connected together very securely and it's all put on this thing called a dovetail plate I'm going to start with the camera this is a z wo ASI 1600 mm cool I have version 3 there now on to the pro version which is sorta like version 4 which has made a couple improvements to this one including a memory buffer but most of the features in the pro are in this version 3 version it is a Panasonic micro four-thirds sensor but it is mono and it is very sensitive in front of that I have the ZW o electronic filter wheel it's an eighth position I've filled seven of the positions I'm using all Astrid on mounted one and a quarter inch filters I have L RGB and the three common narrow bands h-alpha oh three and s2 basically if you're using a mono camera you need to use some kind of filter to choose which wavelengths of light you're going to be imaging in the most broadband filter would be a loom filter which basically lets in all visible lights but you can choose just to let in all the red wavelengths all the blue all the green these are still broadband because there are a lot of wavelengths of light coming in including watts from light pollution sources and other things that are here in Earth's atmosphere that you don't necessarily want I mostly shoot narrowband especially if I'm here in the yard because it blocks most light pollution and it's just a very it's blocking almost all light except a three nanometer bandpass and in that three nanometer bandpass is very important spectral lines coming from these emission nebulae so the most common one is hydrogen because there's hydrogen all over the place and so H alpha hydrogen alpha is ionized hydrogen and that's it's 656 nanometers so I have a filter in there that's only letting in that wavelength of light and that's what I use a lot I also use the oh three a lot which is more sort of in the blue spectrum H a is in the red okay next up here I have just a spacer especially with astronomical cameras as opposed to dslr's you have to need spacers that are and have to you know play around with this a little bit just to make sure you get all the spacing correct and then next up here is the scope this is the stellar view SV 86 Q it is an apple chromatic refractor it's a quadruplet design meaning there's four lens elements inside here you can basically think of it as a big camera lens and in fact until quite recently I was imaging mostly with a 200 millimeter Canon L lens I just recently went to this I'm not going to talk too much more about it because I want to do a full review video because it's pretty new onto the market and I really like it so far but I want to give it my full attention in another long video attached to that in the finder base right here is an Astra mania 60 millimeter guide scope this is a pretty cheap guide scope I got it off Amazon but I liked it because it came with these nice rings and a pretty good focus or here I did have to extend the focus or a little bit with this Orion extender and then inside that is my guide camera this is as ewo a si 290 mm mini they do make a fuller sized one that has USB 3 which is good for planetary but I was just going to be using it as a guide camera so I got the mini version one thing I like about the 1600 is that it does have a USB hub right here in the back so you can see I'm using quite a short little cable here to connect my guide camera right in there it also has the USB cable for my filter wheel and so now I just have one cable coming out where if I didn't have that hub on the camera I would have three cables coming off the end here so that's really nice and that's it so this is my whole imaging train if you see that word that's what this that means it means like everything that's coming off here off the scope you put on top of your mount one other word you might see and I think it confuses a lot of people new to this hobby is OTA that acronym that stands for optical tube assembly and it just means the telescope itself a lot of times they'll sell telescopes without the mount and so they often say OTA only just the telescope not the mount and that's how astrophotographers usually buy their telescopes because we get really nice mounts and then we want to buy the telescope separately next up I just want to mention some accessories but they're actually pretty important especially this first one these are do heater bands so these just heat up a little bit and what you do is you put this around your guide scope and the bigger one here around my imaging scope and they just keep that front lens element a little bit warmer than the air temperature which prevents those glass elements from doing up which you really don't want to happen and to power these I use this little thousand oaks heater controller it has four channels right now I'm just using two so this one is pretty essential especially here in the East Coast if you're in a really dry area you might never need it the next one I also consider pretty essential especially if you don't have automated focusing I'm probably moving towards automated focusing which is where you put a motor you're focuser and let the computer rack the focus are in and out but I so far haven't been able to afford it or just haven't found the need but I probably will get it in this next year or so as I'm getting more and more automated anyways this is a button off mask it's just a focusing tool where you point the telescope towards a bright star and it makes this very particular repeatable pattern where you can put one spike between two other spikes and once you reach that you know that you have the correct focus position you do have to do it for each filter typically actually with the svq 86 I have found I don't have to refocus between RG and B which is really nice but I do between the narrow bands and the broad bands anyway it's badenov mask I got mine 3d printed for not that much money so it fits my scope perfectly and if you go down to my website and go to that resources page for this video I'll link out to a botton of mask generator which lets you make your own SVG file for your scope to get you the right pattern and then I just used Tinkercad which is a free website to make it into a 3d model and then that's what I sent to the 3d printing service pretty easy last this is definitely not necessary with the Orion atlas because the rhein Atlas does have a built-in polar scope an illuminated polar scope and I used that for the first year but then I bought this and I don't regret it because this is a really really nice little piece of gear it's called the qhy pole master and it's an electronic polar scope so it has a little camera in there a little black-and-white camera and a wide angle lens on the front and you just point this generally towards the area of Polaris and in the software that comes with it you pick up the pattern of stars around Polaris and I'll show this later on in this video and you get a really really accurate polar alignment with this the advantage to that especially when you're setting up each night like I do is then when you do your first go-to you actually get to the star on your imaging chip so I don't need a tell rad or finderscope on my setup because I always get to the star right away and I think I think my polar alignment for that so you might be wondering why do plate solving do I still need this I still just think a good polar alignment is really handy for imaging it's not essential though so of these three pieces of equipment this is the one I don't consider as essential next up we have power so I power everything that I have off this one battery what I power includes my laptop my camera because of its cooler thermoelectric cooler I do heater my mount a couple other things I'm probably forgetting my USB hub so I power all of that off this one big battery this is a really common way to do it because you get sort of the most bang for your buck this is a really good value it's a deep-cycle lead-acid marine battery I bought the battery at Walmart and I think I also got the battery case there too which just gives you easy access to these terminals here and protects the battery a little bit and this is a 114 amp hour battery what that means in practice for my year is that I could image for two full nights and still have the battery at something like 30 or 40 percent with this style of battery you don't want to drain it completely because that's not good for it and it shortens the lifespan the other thing you do to keep this battery happy is you plug it into something called a charger maintainer or a trickle charger which basically even when the battery is full it just sort of provides a little bit at all times you don't keep it off electricity you haven't plugged in all the time I mean that also lengthens the life of this kind of battery again this is a deep-cycle lead-acid marine battery you get them in Walmart I'll put the link in my website okay most people who go this way I shouldn't say most people but a lot of people understand that this is a DC source all of the gear that we have are also DC so it's most efficient just to run everything directly off the battery with some fuses in the line I haven't gotten there yet because I'm not super confident with electrical stuff and just have been sort of lazy about it what I do have is this power inverter so this plugs into the battery and you can see it has a couple just standard outlets there and what I do is then I just plug in AC to DC adapters into this and then run that to all my different things now that is not efficient I lose a lot of efficiency by going from DC to AC back to DC but for me it's just been working it's easy but I've down the road I'm gonna invest in some power pole connectors and other things that make this a more efficient power setup last piece of gear I want to talk about is my camera my pole master my guide set up my filter wheel my mount are all connected to a laptop where I can control everything with software the kind of laptop you buy isn't super important you are though locked into particular kinds of software based on the operating system you run so for me I ended up with a Windows laptop because I liked certain software that was only available on Windows but other people are very happy with Linux or Mac so just look into the different kinds of software before you purchase a laptop the other thing you want to look at is since my camera is USB 3 I did decide to upgrade to a laptop with USB 3 ports which makes the download time faster before this Lenovo ThinkPad I was using an MSI wind which was pretty old only like one gigabyte of RAM and it only had USB 2 ports it was just sort of slow but it worked fine so I tell people you know you don't really need a great laptop for acquisition as long as you have a decent souped-up laptop or a computer for processing but if you want to get all-in-one then that's a whole different set of considerations because I wouldn't want to process on a really slow computer because that's where it uses your computer specs a lot more heavily than acquisition which doesn't really put a lot of stress on the computer anyways the computer for acquisition is really just to run the software so the software that I run is carte du ciel for acquisition sorry cart du ciel for my planetarium program PhD 2 for guiding sequence generator Pro for acquisition and also framing talking to the mound to plate solving all these kinds of things and qhy pol master for the polar alignment and something new I just won at an after imaging conference was pin point which is just a really fast plate solver that talks to sequence generator Pro and mix plate solving really fast well played solving is is basically it just takes a picture of the sky and solves the image it understands the patterns of the stars so that it knows where your mount is pointed which is really useful for imaging because otherwise you have to do a three star alignment to get your mount pointed in the right direction a lot of times so plate solving speeds everything up alright that's it for showing you all my equipment what each piece does next up I'm gonna do a full set up this is for real hopefully I'll have a clear night and we can set up for my imaging session tonight I'll show you each step what I'm doing I'll talk you through it starting with setting up the mount putting the scope on balancing it doing polar alignment all these different steps we're gonna end with setting up what I do on the computer before I start the sequence in sequence generator Pro okay first thing is we set up the tripod ideally we want a pretty level piece of ground for this and one where it's not going to sink into the ground too much so if you have wet ground that's not ideal but concrete isn't always ideal either because it does lot off a lot of heat as it's cooling down so sometimes a grass field is nice like this one but more important about location is that you have a clear view of Polaris because you're gonna use that to set up polar alignment of your telescope and that you also earn a good location for whatever object you're shooting that night a lot of people forget about this and they get everything set up and then they realize they're not the best location in the yard so I always sort of look on an app or planetarium program and try to figure that out ahead of time okay the first thing we're going to do with the tripod is we're gonna level it and I'm just going to do a rough leveling because I like to do a more fine leveling once I have a tripod fully loaded do my rough leveling I use this app right here this is called PS align Pro and it has just like a little basic level or in there I think this is iPhone only but I'm sure there's leveler programs on Android phones too so you can just watch me doing this real quick I'll probably speed it up in the final video next I'm going to show you is putting on the peer extension and my home-built tripod tray I also use the normal ryan tray because with the peer extension it isn't necessary part and it also adds a little bit more stability so you can watch me putting those on now okay for this next part it's really important that you lift with your knees not your back so you really want to bend down because I'm lifting the mount head on to the peer extension here under the tripod and it's quite heavy so here we go okay that's on there now how do you know what direction to point it this is the front where the counter weight shaft comes out and where the poor hole for the polar alignment scope is that's the front of it and that's what you want to point to due north so I'm going to point it this way which is north and with this particular setup I now have to add three little screws around this ring right here to secure the mount head to the pier extension so I'm just going to do that and speed this part of any water to let out the counterweight shaft you just undo this little latch right here it hides up inside there Orion Atlas mounted that lets it out and then you tighten that back up to make the counterweight shaft more solid you then take off this little retainer screw here and then the supplied counterweights go right on now if you had a very heavy scope you might need to counter weights way down here when I was using just my camera lens I really just needed one counterweight way up here I know with my particular imaging payload right now I need to counter weights right about there now how do I know this in a minute here we're gonna balance the whole thing once we get everything on there and that's how you know where to put the counter weights on the shaft after you put those on there you want to put the retainer back on because if one of these fell off the shaft onto your foot you could break your foot stir 11 pounds each I think put that back on all right we now have the weights on there that means we can now put our imaging setup up here on the dovetail cell okay I have my full imaging setup I keep mine completely setup like this completely attached from night to night there's a number of reasons I do that one of them is because I'm working on a mosaic right now so I don't want to change the rotation of the camera I know that I'm in a pretty good focal position for both the guide scope and the imaging camera right now so that makes things a lot faster so there's a lot of reasons if you set up every night just keep your whole imaging train attached like this now all I have to do is just take the whole thing put it into the right position here and slide it back onto the dovetail saddle and if you loosen these a little bit okay how do I know where to put it here I've marked it with tape right there because I know from previous nights that this particular payload balanced in a particular way because of how the weight is distributed so I marked it with fate that's a good idea if you like me can keep your whole imaging train intact like this so now all I have to do is just tighten these two little knobs up I do them pretty tight so that this isn't going anywhere now this whole thing is nice and secure and now it's just about attaching other accessories and cables and power and everything like that I don't balance yet and if I did try to balance right now you can see my balance is a little bit off the reason you don't balance yet is because once you attach cables and take off this heavy lens cover and put on your Dew heaters and all that balance is completely different so you don't want to balance your stuff until it's completely set up for imaging what I could do at this point if it's visible is do a rough polar alignment with Polaris but looking over there in the sky I don't see it yet so I'm gonna keep setting up get my power set up and my cables run and everything like that alright next up I get my battery really close to the base of the tripod like cool cycling my inverter on the tray if connect the leads of my inverter to the battery and then I connect this power squid to their I don't turn anything on yet I'm going to connect all the different devices and then I turn everything on at once okay so next up I'm going to do a rough polar alignment to do that I mean it's cake when I pull my skirt here and take this big cap off here and then the other thing you have to do to get this clear for the polar scope is turn your scope up here in the deck axis I need to raise this way and now it's clear okay so what I would normally do to align now is I'd open up PS align pro which shows me the Ryan Sky Watcher reticle and where Polaris should be on it and then I just go in here and look and line it up in the scope all right with everything attached I can have balance balance first to the death taxes and the way to balance is to just need their scope in two different positions and it should basically stay outside it's falling down towards the lines so that means I got to push weight back away from the lens a little bit just a small adjustment will make a big difference I'm just going to push it just a little bit there tighten that back up and now when I put it down here you can see it's just sort of staying on its own we'll try the other side and a little cable drag there that's now balanced now keep in mind you're going to be pointing this in basically one direction in the sky for most of the night probably so for me that's this direction so balanced in this direction is a little bit more important than the other direction I also know that pointing in this direction my cables will be nice and loose down here so I won't have any cable drag that's another big thing to pay attention to you if you have enough cable lengths so that you don't get any sort of tightness in the cables which could be a big factor and stop you from getting good track all right so I'm balanced now and deck C you know tighten that back up and then you balance in RA which is this bigger access here this and so I go this way see if it balances on all these different positions it arleigh looks pretty good but let's say it wasn't balanced I'm gonna move this weight way down here okay it's not balanced and it's obviously gonna sort of fall down towards the weight side so then I would just move these weights up all right now balance can RA now this might master there's a flat okay when attaching the pull master here I always make sure to put the USB cable off here to the right then when you see it on the computer screen it makes a little bit more sense I used to have it playing down but pointing it off to the right will make more sense on computer screen this is all now set up mechanically and it's going to tighten up my latches here in what's called the home position where this whole thing is kind of a chap down clips okay now I'm at the computer and I've just started it I have all my programs that I used right down here at the bottom I'm going to open up the first one which is carte du ciel this is my planetarium program and the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go here to the setup menu and I'm just going to go in here to the observatory option which lets me set where I am and the last time I use this computer is in the friend's yard so I'm going to set it now to my backyard and I've already saved that in here but you can always put in something different and save other options now that I have that I'm going to apply it and go ahead and just make sure that held okay click okay and now I'm gonna go over here and click this little button this is my connect to the telescope and I use Escom specifically the EQ mod or tqs comm configuration for any kind of Orion or Sky Watcher mount and this also has a place to put in site information I'm just going to show you how you would put in a new one here so I'm just going to type in new art backyard and what you want to do is make sure that the information for latitude and longitude matches exactly - what's over here in cart do CL so they don't match up then it's not gonna work great let's enter this in 75 44 19 oh and where did I get this information I use my smartphone a bunch of different apps will tell you your GPS coordinates but you can also get it on Google Maps or anywhere what did I do here that was not good since I was talking and typing I must've missed something up here let me try it again let me go back in here configure I was still down there in downstream well I know what I did I endured oh oh right here rather than zero zero okay let me put in zero zero save okay looks good okay save her do this let me just go back in there one more time to double-check it yep looks good okay so now that's all setup I can go ahead and click connect right here and I can hear my mount just turned on it's engaged you can see over here it says parked I'm not gonna unpark it yet cuz I do some other things first but I do clear my alignment points I don't know if this is necessary but I like to do it because now it says you know the azimuth is zero Dec is 90 so it's all ready to go and then I always just set some new alignment points each night okay I'm gonna go them and minimize that and I can see here my planetarium that I am parked at Polaris and go ahead and open up PhD - this is my guiding program and what I do in here is I just go ahead and connect to my mount and also to the guide camera but before I connect to the guide camera have to go in here to camera setup the reason for this is because I'm using two ASI cameras on the same driver so you can see it connected automatically here to the 1600 but I don't want to use that as my guide cam so I'm gonna switch it to the 290 and the other thing I'm going to do here is for some reason it always switches to 16-bit images for guiding you want the 8-bit images so that's fine now click OK connect you can connect to the mount and then I can close this window alright and then I go ahead and loop just to make sure that the guide camera is working and roughly in focus and that does not look right now let's see what's going on here hold on one second Oh am i okay so it was just that my cover my lens cover was on the guide scope so I took that off and now I can see some stars there that's good okay so that's all I do at this point with it I just test that it's working and I can stop and minimize that and now I open up sgp sequence generator Pro that one takes a little longer to load sit sometimes checks for new versions and stuff okay that was pretty fast okay the first thing I do is I just close out of this untitled sequence that it makes automatically here and then I'm gonna go ahead and go up here to tools and equipment profile manager and you go into my default profile right now which is this one the one I'm gonna use tonight and again I have to click on settings here and set the driver because it went to the 290 but I want the 1600 for this because this is what I'm using the image with I could set my gain and offset here but they're already set correctly for this night so I'm gonna hit OK and hit OK again it says would you like to save changes to this profile yes okay then I go back to the Tools menu and I'm going to connect all equipment this is how I do it some people do it differently but this gets everything going the main thing it does at this point is it starts my imaging camera cooling so if you look up here in the upper right you see it says power and cooling now and now it's starting to cool down that little percentage is how hard the fans are working so as it's cooling down those will kick into high gear and keep going now alright I'm gonna go ahead and take an exposure here and that looks like all black because I haven't set an auto stretch so I'm going to go ahead and turn on auto stretch here I usually set it to medium and take another one okay that's fine I can see a bunch of stars there okay and now I'm gonna go ahead and go into my pull master software the qhy pull master that comes up and I'm just gonna drag this to the top to make a full screen and I'm gonna connect to the pull master not found okay so let me go check what's up with that one good way in Windows 10 is I can just go here into settings and devices and it shows me everything that's connected and no pull master so I must have missed it let me go see here one second there we go okay so I just hadn't plugged it in there it's plugged in now I can see it right there into my devices the reason it shows up with its name there is cuz I'd already installed the drivers for it now when I connect here you can see the Stars it says set the parameters to the left to make more stars around Polaris visible okay so I'm gonna turn up the exposure and the gain a little bit yep and now I can see more stars or on Polaris that's good so I'll say finished double click Polaris and use the rotate slider okay so double click Polaris it's right there in the middle and then over here on the left I use this rotate slider to match up the stars around Polaris and so you can just use this little minus plus you can drag this when you drag it it's sometimes a little bit hard but oh I just got pretty close actually there so that was sort of lucky but a lot of times when you get close you can use that your left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to really dial it in say like this just does a little increments okay good success and what you like to use the access center position recorded last time you use pull master I'm going to say yes here because I haven't changed mouse but if you're changing mounts you might want it you know say no so you can actually set where pull masters center of access is so it says double click Polaris again again use the rotate slider good looks good click success okay and now what this is telling me is that little target down there is where I have to use my altitude and azimuth bolts in my mouth to get Polaris to match up with that target and then you can see up here in the upper left it's like a zoomed in view and that's wherever my mouse is so I'm just going to go over here to the mount and I'm going to try to set this it's going to move around a little bit wildly like that that's just common with this particular amount let me bring it back here and I'm looking at this live I mean I just moved my laptop a little bit okay I'm getting closer jumps around a little bit okay there we go no I just sort of nudge it just by nudging this and this is not the Ryan Atlas's strong suit this is not a good part of its design as these things are really hard to move okay this is a little bit easier okay we're getting close and I like to get this very close to that little plus sign right in the middle of the target right away because concentrate it's pretty good could do a little better I think nope overshot it there yeah that's pretty good I like to get this very accurate right away because you'll see in a second here the last step it sort of jumps around a little bit more so the closer I can get in this step the better so I think I have it now I'm gonna click finished and then I'm gonna click double-click I'm gonna double-click Polaris here again and one more time and says you can rotate these I'll just hit the left arrow to get them centered click success ok now this is the last step I can click start monitor and ideally now I would Center that Green Cross with that red circle but if I have them at least overlapping like this I usually skip this step because usually my seeing isn't good enough to really support doing this so I'm gonna go ahead and close out of the whole thing that's good enough for me ok I'm gonna take another exposure and there's Polaris up there at the top great cooling is almost at negative 15 we're almost ready here to get rolling I'm gonna go ahead though and move closer to my target by unpark on my mount starting saudi riyal tracking opening this up and hit this little green plus guy to add a star alignment now some people skip this because they are doing plate solving but I just like to do this as a backup to have cart to see I'll know where mount mount is pointed as well as sequence generator Pro so if SGP quits for some reason the mount is still tracking okay so I'm going to go ahead and go up here and type in Vega because it's a nice bright star the enter moves to there in the planetarium and then I can go ahead and click slew up here okay my mouth starts moving it's moving to Vega and you can see the little target moving there on the screen and I can see my mount moving but kind of the lights set up any worse I can't show you that but there we go settling in and if we're lucky now when I go back here to sequence generator Pro we should see they got right on the screen there we go go ahead and minimize this and open up sequence generator Pro get this guy out of the way first of all this check of the loom filter set I like to have the loom filter said what I'm just doing this centering part because then I can take shorter exposures there we go and there we go it's up there in that upper corner now I just want to Center it and I'm gonna Center it using this Northwest East South buttons here I don't really know which direction I should go so I'm just gonna try north first that moves it down and a little bit left now I'll try West hey what did that do I'm gonna get left left and up try again now getting close it just has to go a little down a little more north mmm just do it touch east okay I'm gonna say that is centered so I'm gonna go ahead and click accept and then let's click end here because you really I don't do more than a one-star line especially with plate solving let me just show you actually how plate solving works you just right-click on the image you click plate solve you click solve it solves the image meaning it looks for patterns and the image says solve complete down there and now sequence generator Pro knows where it's pointed to okay good enough so now everything knows where it's pointed it's pointed to Vega Vega is not actually where I'm ending up for the night but I'm gonna stay here a little bit longer because I'm gonna focus on Vega really bright stars Vega is the brightest star but in the winter you have you know Rigel or things like that or serious really bright stars like that are nice to focus on when you're using a botton off-task like I do let me know switch to my o3 filter here it's now set to the o3 cuz that's what I'm shooting tonight I'm just going to put on the botton of mask I'll be right back okay I'm gonna set this exposure a little bit higher because of the oh three filter I'm gonna set it to eight go ahead and take one take one means take an exposure of course and we'll see how far I'm out of focus looks pretty close from here but let me go ahead and zoom in okay that's pretty good but you can see the central spike is a little bit to the right zoom in a little further not too far off but noticeably closer to that right spike than the left spike so I always start by moving my focus or travel inward and so go ahead and do that and then I'm gonna go ahead and take another exposure and we're gonna see which direction left or right the central spike moves okay and it definitely moved further right so now we're more out of focus if we were this out of focus that would be a bad thing so I'm going to now move my focus or travel outward okay and I think I overshot just a tiny bit but that's looking pretty close you just move it a tad inward I do have a I mean obviously this is a manual focus or because I'm doing this manually but I'll take another one here but I do have a two-speed focus or so it has that ten-to-one reduction so I can do pretty small moves and see it move at all let me take me move it a little bit more sometimes I get a little backlash in the focus here okay see how this does sorry this is this is boring but this is sort of typical okay that looks pretty good I think that might be it I mean the zoom out of here I think I'm done so I'm gonna take off the botton of mask for now I want file open sequence and because I've already started this Oh three collection it's my mosaic there we go open up that existing sequence and pull this up here now I'm three frames into this panel panel number six but right now I'm just gonna check everything that's connected this is important with a mosaic that your manual rotator it says is connected you'll see why in a second here the next thing I do here is I go create this a little bit here and I'm going to go ahead and see there we go double click it and slew to my targets okay yes so remember I already played solved in this GP on Vega so it sort of knows where it is now it's slowing to my panel not too far away and that's done and then I like to go ahead and center it now so we'll see how far it's off so it first takes a image and it solves it and it says I failed because I'm not within a critical eye when I'm a hundred and nine pixels off in the RA 254 in the deck so instead of clicking run again since not sure if that's gonna work right now I'm gonna click done and I'm going to complete solve this image salt see that came back really snappy this is pin point go ahead and click OK and I'm going to slough again so I'm gonna go up here to this gear you can actually right click it yeah yep and I can get solved flew to target right from that menu ok yep okay sloughs again it was much closer this time but now it new sort of where it was and I'm gonna go ahead and try Center again we'll see if it does a better job this time there we go 0 Dec X is there negative 9 ra 9 pixel toll okay so that's within my 10 that's good okay we're gonna start looping exposures in the guide camera lots of stars to choose from you can see there's some wispy clouds moving through but that's ok this is just for practice and I'm just gonna click through some stars here I'm trying to find one that's pretty high SNR but not saturated and you see that down at the bottom of the screen there it's pretty good ok around the mid 30s looks reasonably InFocus not saturated ok so now what I'm gonna do is gonna hold down shift and click on this little start guiding thing it says do you want to force recalibration I do I do this every night I'm gonna go ahead and click OK ok now it goes through the calibration process I'm gonna go ahead and speed this up in the video because it is quite tedious what the calibration process just did though was it set basically the steps that the guide camera cans the kinds of Corrections that the camera can send to the mount which is based on a bunch of different things and you need to do that so that it sends accurate corrections okay another thing I've noticed the reason I'd like to do this guiding separately from before I start my sequence is because my mount takes a little while to settle in here you can see that that red line of the Dec axis right now it's just just keeps going under where it should be and these big Corrections aren't moving it well now now it's finally moving it now that I said that but you get the idea it just takes a little while to settle in I've noticed and so I like to give it a few seconds before I start the sequence here just make sure it can settle a little bit once I feel like it's settling I'm gonna go ahead and start the sequence when I start the sequence it actually pauses the guider and then usually Auto selects a new star anyways but typically it does a really good job of selecting a star sometimes better than me so that's looking good now I'm gonna go ahead and switch back to sequence generator Pro here and like I said I've already started the sequence so I'm just gonna go ahead and click run okay what does it do it makes sure's I'm still centered on target yep and now it's resuming the auto guider we can go switch back to PhD and watch you do that yep there pick that star yeah that's a good star closer to the edge mid-30s SNR Wow look at how could those Corrections are it's pretty stable and it's not a good night but that's looking like it's gonna be a good guide star all right I'm going to switch back to sgp here make sure I'm integrating yep I can see down there at the bottom I'm integrating my first frame of the night so that's it I'm done thank you for listening and I hope to do a lot more of these I can check out my website nebula photos.com and I'm definitely open to suggestions as well thanks so much

Channel: Nebula Photos

Views: 133,433

Rating: 4.9432135 out of 5

Keywords: orion atlas eq-g, zwo asi1600mm-cool, astrodon filters, stellarvue svq86, astrophotography, dso, deep sky, astronomy, equipment, setup, qhy polemaster, bahtinov mask, deep cycle marine battery, nebula, nebulae, nebula photos, nico carver, zwo asi290mm-mini, astromania 60mm guide scope, phd2, sequence generator pro, windows 10, cartes du ciel, dewnot strips, thousand oaks dew heater controller, pinpoint, eqmod, lenovo thinkpad

Id: ksFO3d6XvH0

Length: 57min 6sec (3426 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 21 2018