How I Took a Picture of a Galaxy

[Music] this is the 36-inch reflector telescope it's used to study the stars okay wait i have a question that is on my mind and i can't stop thinking about it which is is it possible to take a picture of another galaxy like can someone do that who's not nasa like from your backyard can you point your camera at the sky and actually capture another galaxy that would be crazy this was a moment for me i've only had a few moments like this in my life where i ask what feels like a simple innocent question but it's actually not a simple question it's a question that ends up being like a spark lit into a dry field of brush this question sat with me for a few weeks and then one day i finally broke down and just googled it the main tool the answer is yes standing in your backyard even if you live next to a light polluted city you can photograph a galaxy like a different galaxy outside of our own i promised myself that i would do whatever it took to photograph another galaxy let's make one thing clear up front which is that i am not an astronomer before this i'd never looked through a telescope i couldn't name any stars or point out any constellations so what you're about to see is a long frustrating journey of me trying to learn something that is unbelievably technical and precise it's a story of complicated gear that seems impossible to learn complicated software it's the story of a laptop that arrived at my door one day and it's the story of hitting rock bottom and wanting to give up i'm going to bed i'm going to bed i'm going to bed so this is the story of my quest to photograph a galaxy [Music] after a bunch of research i set my sights on a galaxy called messier 101 or m101 and even though this isn't the brightest galaxy in the sky it seemed like a good choice because it's always above the horizon and it's one that i could try to photograph from the back patio of my studio this galaxy is 21 million light years away meaning the light we're seeing now has been traveling for 21 million years and the galaxy is somewhere around the handle of the big dipper you can't actually see it with your eye but presumably it's there this is the little patch of sky that i would begin looking at night after night hoping that behind the light pollution and all of this darkness that there was light that had been traveling for millions of years that i could connect with and capture on my camera but let's not get ahead of ourselves there was still a lot of work to do [Music] i have a feeling i'm getting in way over my head now i've taught myself a lot of technical skills all my animation and filmmaking skills i learned just by watching tutorials on the internet there's one thing i've learned about this self-teaching process and it looks like this if you want to learn something new like a language a piece of software a technical skill you inevitably have your eye on the prize what you want to do with that skill you see your goal and you start walking towards it but you'll quickly realize that this journey is not as straightforward as you thought you start to descend you get deeper and deeper into new unfamiliar information lots of weird new concepts that seemingly have nothing to do with your end goal you're soon so deep in this that you feel like you're not getting anywhere you feel further from your goal than you were when you started like it's totally out of sight but the secret here that you learn after you do this process a few times is that eventually you hit rock bottom of this mind-numbing chaotic intake of information and after you hit rock bottom you start going up you're moving towards your goal again concepts that used to just feel like mind-numbing chaos start to make sense and you realize that you're moving towards your goal and eventually you emerge from this abyss and you reach your goal but it was only through that descent and that rise that you were able to do this this is the process for learning difficult things from calculus to a new language the cruelest part about this whole abyss of learning is that the whole thing is shrouded in fog meaning when you are descending down into this you don't know where the bottom is you don't know if the bottom is here or if it's all the way down here this is a scary uncertain frustrating reality and it's why most people quit when they're trying to learn a new skill like this the only thing you can do is just keep going [Music] alexa make the office lights red there we go [Music] i watched a few tutorials on how to set this stuff up and it's feeling incredibly complicated so after that first night of setting up the camera and like dramatically struggling to like get it all working and all that stuff i thought i was like deep in this learning abyss and i have no idea what i'm doing i thought i was like here i had absorbed all this info i'd done all the research on what gear i needed to buy and i set it all up i read the instruction manual i was like man i am so deep in this astrophotography thing big lens i feel like it's speaking my language just like a few days away from photographing a galaxy no no no no no no i was not even close i was actually here the fog was very thick and i had no idea and so over the next couple of weeks i began to realize what was actually happening here before you can even take pictures of the night sky the first thing you have to do is take this mount and you have to align it to the night sky you point it at different stars you align it to the north star you do all this stuff to basically tell the mount where it is in the world and where the night sky is and then it starts to track the night sky as the earth spins it's really cool but it's kind of complicated to get it right i'm deep in this dark sky way out at my cabin everything should be perfect and i can't even align my telescope and it's super important because if your telescope isn't aligned it's not going to be able to point in the right patch of sky to photograph a galaxy well now i've got a giant full moon to keep me company but the reality is i just spent 30 minutes trying to locate the northern star with my polar alignment scope thing so i've got much bigger problems than a full moon i had predicted that it would take me one or maybe two days to get this alignment right instead after about a month i finally started to have success aligning my telescope mount moment of truth i think the telescope is now totally lined and if it points at the moon that means i did it right here we go enter it's going oh man oh man it's pointing at them it's pointing at the moon i finally got my telescope mount aligned to the night sky and i thought okay the hard part's over i've done it i've aligned the telescope now i just need to take my picture and it turns out i was totally right in fact i was already on my way up from the abyss i just had to press a couple of buttons and suddenly i was getting amazing shots of far away galaxies every night no that is definitely not what happened in fact the reality was that i had barely inched down to where i was before there was still a lot more to go luckily i had stumbled upon an instagram account with some amazing shots of the night sky i dm'd andrew who runs the account and asked for some help andrew kept talking about stacking stacking your images stick the images i need to take multiple pictures of the same patch of sky so i can layer them together you're not just taking one picture of a galaxy you're taking hundreds of pictures of that same patch of sky and you integrate them together you stack them together which will get rid of a lot of the weird noise and stuff and it will allow you to see the galaxy stacking so i did what andrew and the internet tutorials told me to do i took hundreds of shots while my telescope mount would track this little patch of sky where i hoped the galaxy was but then came the slow part spending hours loading these huge image files onto my computer and waiting what seemed like forever for the computer to process and calibrate and stack all of these images into one final image this took forever and often the final result wasn't very encouraging this is very disappointing it's one in the morning and i'm looking at basically a black frame with a few little dots that are the stars and the software gave me this nothing it looks like nothing it looks like a bunch of white dots on a black background i'm really excited about this new hobby of mine i don't know man i'm going to bed i'm going to bed i'm going to bed here is the moment that i was ready to throw in the towel to give up i had invested a lot of time and money into this goal and i felt like i was nowhere closer to photographing and seeing m101 than when i started after hours of these brain numbing tutorials and fiddling with these tools and trying night after night all i had to show for it was this i started to question if the telescope was even pointing in the right bit of sky to capture m101 i was ready to give up it's months later and i've been trying a million things i'm budding up against a really really complicated reality which is i'm trying to photograph a galaxy outside of my own millions of light years away from me of course that's going to be hard the idea of photographing a galaxy feels so distant for me like it feels so [Music] far away i couldn't see it then but i see now that that night i was at rock bottom it was at the bottom of this abyss my quest to photograph a galaxy had turned into a mess of sleepless nights fiddling with complicated equipment and hours waiting for my computer to process hundreds of images it seemed like i really hadn't learned anything but in fact i had i had made it through the most excruciating part the descent into chaotic novel abstract information and now it was time to go up i really wanted a rocky style montage and i didn't get that in real life but the best i can do is give you that rocky montage so here it goes a few things happen next first i committed to devouring tutorials daily there's a pretty active niche community of astrophotographers on the internet many of whom take it upon themselves to make extensive tutorials part one part two and part three i had watched a lot of these tutorials before but they didn't actually make sense the first time around but now months later i could watch them and they actually started to sink in luckily it was at this time that i got reached out to by nvidia who makes like graphics cards and hardware for computers they wanted to send me an hp laptop that was packed with a really nice graphics card this would make my workflow a lot easier because now i would have a computer with a graphics card that actually talked to my software and was optimized for really fast editing and fast processing especially in photoshop and lightroom this would make the whole process a lot quicker and what this meant as well is that i could use this laptop which was a pc to control a dedicated astro camera so i could do it all for my computer this new machine empowered me and completely changed the game i'm on my way up this is amazing i am getting there [Music] but it didn't photograph the galaxy for me i still had a lot of work to do over the next couple of months this was my life i started sleeping on the patio so that i could image throughout the night and then one night i was at my computer fishing around in this sea of grainy pixels and i saw something holy crap okay this is my really shitty image from last night but if you zoom in you actually start to see a literal galaxy that is insane yeah this is this is hundreds of images together [Music] it's paying off this looked like my galaxy like m101 i immediately texted my astrophotography sensei andrew but as i said in the text there's still a lot of work to do and then one day it happened i made it to the top i was on the other side of this abyss i stacked 400 images from a night of shooting i brought it into my new computer i stacked it up integrated it processed it did all of these things that i had now done hundreds of times and in that moment i answered my question from months earlier from your backyard can you point your camera at the sky and actually capture another galaxy yes me from the past you can photograph another galaxy standing on the back patio of your studio if you just point your telescope at the right patch of sky for the right amount of time you will be able to capture light that has been traveling for 21 million years to meet you and you can record that as an image and that image looks like this this is m101 or the pinwheel galaxy 21 million light years from earth it's one of the most beautiful things i've ever seen mainly because i worked so hard to capture this bit of light that was really hard very discouraging at times but throughout all of it there were really special moments i got to spend countless nights outside looking up contemplating the distances in space something my brain can't even begin to digest and all of this in order to capture a little bit of light from 21 million years ago that has been traveling towards earth all that time and i got to record that little teaspoon of light this process gave me a new perspective one i won't easily forget it taught me that if you want to learn something new all that stands between you and that goal is a descent and a rise through this abyss another takeaway from this process was the importance of having good tools for your goal as i told you in this story this moment actually happened where i was struggling i was spending so much time on these image stacks and i then got reached out to by nvidia and hp who wanted to send me this laptop that promised way better performance and indeed it delivered suddenly my image stacking workflow which would take me like an hour suddenly was like a 15 minute thing more importantly when i would open up these images that are like 400 megabyte tiff files you know really really heavy i'd open them up in photoshop no more lagging i was able to like zoom in and actually zoom around this image and edit it and there was no like flashy lagging issues that i was getting with my old laptop the display was like butter smooth i could zoom in i could change levels and curves and all this stuff and like it would just update on the display it was just a pleasure to work on and made it way less discouraging for me to practice my post-processing this is all made possible because nvidia the graphics card maker has found a way to get the graphics card to talk to the software in a way that is optimized for performance so now when i'm rendering stuff in premiere it's way faster like 30 minute renders suddenly turn into like 12-minute renders if i'm trying to render proxies for you know a time lapse which is like hundreds and hundreds of images that's now going at double or triple the speed i'm incredibly grateful for that because it helped kick-start my second wind to help me actually get serious about completing this goal again this wasn't some like fabricated planned moment this actually happened in the course of my trying to complete this goal so there's a link in my description if you want to check out this laptop or learn more about nvidia and their studio drivers and how that works to make your workflow quicker go check out that link and thank you to nvidia and hp for supporting this video and supporting my goal to photographic galaxy for sending me this laptop and for supporting this channel last thing i'll say is if anyone wants a high-res version of this galaxy image that i shot i'm going to be giving it out to anyone who is a patron on patreon so go check out my patreon if you want a high-res version or anything else that's on patreon thank you all for watching [Music]

Channel: Johnny Harris

Views: 420,523

Rating: 4.9659619 out of 5

Keywords: Johnny Harris, Johnny Harris Vox, Vox Borders, Johnny Harris Vox Borders, Vox

Id: zKDe094o-Q8

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020