How to: Beginner Astrophotography with a DSLR and Telescope

[Music] but at the same time I'm up till 3:00 a.m. on a week night get to this stuff if uh if the weather's clear so uh you quickly realize in this hobby that uh the hardest thing about it is getting the opportunity to uh to shoot under clear skies because you can't control the weather so you're forced to uh react to the weather that you're given and that could be on a Monday a Monday work night that happens to be clear all night for the first time in two weeks so you want to take advantage of those clear skies uh speaking of U of of weather Lots kind of cloudy tonight or I wouldn't have been able to come tonight I would have to set out in the backyard uh so I'll start by going through the equipment I use um to get these images um and if there's time at the end I'm not sure we could do a live demonstration of the processing an astro image from uh from a raw file to a finished image so how this all got started um I was just intrigued by astronomy images I saw online uh by the Hubble Space Telescope and by professional astrophotographers and uh so I did some more research and that led to uh Astronomy Picture of the day apod it's called and uh I found out that there were amateurs taking amazing images with their own equipment and I just couldn't believe that it was possible that I could possibly get an image uh of this quality myself so I I did some more research um and at this time I I wasn't into photography at all I didn't own a camera uh so but I wanted to do this I knew I wanted to do it so uh I invested in uh an entry level DSLR and it was a a canyon Rebel XS that I bought on sale and uh with the main reason of hooking it up to a telescope and taking uh deep Sky Images uh but this led to all sorts of uh other types of Photography as well nature photography landscape uh I fell in love with photography and general and it started with uh with this believe or not uh um yeah so one one of my other passions is is actually nature photography and bird photography specifically uh and I find it interesting when I find other asop photographers that are also heavily inverting uh I guess it's they share the same appreciation for uh the natural world around us and that's kind of the draw there so uh yeah here's just examples of some bird photography and actually uh two the snowy owl and the blacked blue warer were actually taken through a telescope uh because before I owned a telephoto lens I used my previous telescope to shoot for daytime bird photography uh I was able to get the reach that I needed and uh Crystal Clear Optics the uh the only problem was using um a manual wheel focuser uh which has his challenges perverted like if you can imagine trying to get a Golden Crown kingl uh in a tree hopping around with with the no image civilization or autofocus so I knew I wanted to get pictures of of the night sky and space uh and I didn't know where to start and uh 7 years ago there wasn't the resources there are now um like some helpful YouTube channels and tutorials and kind of the only place I would go for information was astrop photography forums online and that can kind of be a scary place for a beginner because um there's some know it alls on there that uh that can be a little bit um Brash to uh for lack of a better term and it's daunting to ask really beginner new questions when you're just getting into it luckily that's all changed uh and I'm trying to uh do my part to change that as well with uh some of the things I'm doing um so my first few shots of the night sky were blurry outof Focus shots of stars and uh but I was completely blown away by them and I I realized that the camera could capture many more stars in the sky than than your naked eye could see and uh so I was I was thrilled by this uh I did own a tripod uh it was a kit lens that came with the camera that 18 to 55 and and uh so I I would set the camera on a towel uh put it on no flash mode and uh just hope for the best and uh and and like I said I was I was thrilled at the early images but I knew there was lots to learn so these are just some shots from uh my parents backyard uh in a moderately light fluted area of uh of St Catherine's so things started to come together when I joined my uh local astronomy club uh and it's uh actually the parallels to this club it's very similar to the same issues trying to get attract new members and uh very similar to this club very a a close small group uh but there was a lot of astrophotographers in the group that were willing to lend the helping hand and that really sped things up for me getting to ask all the questions that I wanted to and spend nights at our clubs Observatory uh a dark sky site and uh get some real live lessons from those guys okay so I started something called Astro backyard which was my astrophotography blog which was just a free blogger site where I shared my experiences in the backyard attempting astrophotography lessons I've learned and it it eventually grew into something bigger and uh now I have a following on uh Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and the YouTube channel and uh I've been able to help people from all over the world uh get started with astrop photography with a with a friendly Fresh Approach to it where no question is uh is too basic uh so I'm really trying to give back as much as I was helped ear on with Astro back here so speaking of the the YouTube channel I've got uh now 24 videos that cover everything from uh how to Polar align your telescope to uh travel Vlog uh Style videos and uh I'm almost at 6,000 subscribers now so there is there is a following of of of people that are really interested in this kind of stuff so it's uh it's just a joy to uh to be able to share something like this with so many people so uh my interest lies in deep Sky astrophotography specifically uh so deep Sky means uh objects of images of distant objects in space uh such as galaxies nebul modular star clusters uh open star clusters and uh so this is all done through a telescope you can also use a telepal lens but um a telescope is more suited for for for this kind of uh bre in these kind of objects so I'll I'll go through some of my equipment here so uh like I said I'll I use my telescope as a lens and uh sorry these are just the uh types of objects I've been able to capture uh this telescope that I use it's an explore scientific Ed 102 the 102 is because it has a 102 mm objective on it it's the focal length is 714 mm so if you compare that to uh like a telephoto burning lens like a 500 mm F4 uh that gives you an idea of the kind of distance that this has uh the focal ratio is F7 so it's uh it's moderately fast in the telescope World F6 and below are are are considered fast Scopes which which is important because uh you're soaking in staright through the telescope on the camera sensor so the uh the faster that uh scope is the less time you'll need to soak in more photons um here's the telescope here this was uh a week after I got it I was able to bring it up to selur Provincial Park and it was an unbelievable night the Milky Way stretching across the sky and uh it always draws a crowd of campsites people like to come by and look through it and then they of course ask what I'm doing and uh and lots of fun so this is considered a Widefield scope so there's larger telescopes of a different design that are more suited for getting small galaxies and uh really getting a detailed view where this scope uh excels is wide field views such as this um covering a large area in the sky uh this is the North America nebula and uh so I like having that Advantage I'd rather get capture more wide objects like this uh than than to focus on um smaller galaxies and that's just due to my uh personal preference and style what am I looking at I see this red so that's so the North American nebula is an emission nebula uh and so that's gas uh Interstellar dust and gas in the night sky and the reason you don't see that visually looking through a scope but you can see it in a picture is because it's such a long exposure that it's collecting light for hours at a time that that you could otherwise not see and then of course there's the image processing Where You Pull It Forward even more but the false color no that's the real color yeah so uh you once you uh like you're making levels and curves adjustments in Photoshop pulling it forward and uh increasing the saturation similar you would to a to like a landscape image uh but it's all it's all real color so this is a just through the camera RGB real color image so how many exposures is that this one was uh total of about 3 hours and I believe the exposures were 5 minutes each and the reason I was able to go that long because uh was because this was also at a campsite at Rock Point Provincial Park looking south over for Lake yie uh so there's some Dark Skies there I would this shots like this would be tough to do in U in a light looted area like I do at home okay so like I was saying about the smaller galaxies before so this is M51 uh the world pool Galaxy and it's it's breathtaking but it appears rather small in this scope uh it's nice to see it like this in in a sea of background space um but like I said a larger a larger scope it would just fill the frame and um on the other side of the coin the North American nebula you just see a portion of it so because the camera is directly into the telescope without going through an eye piece you're limited to the full length of the scope so whatever your scope's set to think of it as as a prime a prime camera lens okay so speaking of exposures um and it came up a little earlier the it's the most misunderstood part about it I think is the it's like are these images actually real like how like how come you can't see it but you're capturing it in an image so it it all seems uh synthetic and created but uh so there's the his there of that shop and that's the Orion Nebula from home and the background sky looks washed out and pink and that's just light pollution so after sacking several hours worth of disclosures you go in and adjust that image and push the background Sky back to to Black and and pull the color out from the nebula to separated and boost contrast and that's where you get the uh that's how you get the uh a balanced image but that's a typical histogram for an asteroid image you want to expose to the right without clipping the data and then the first step would just to be to bring the slider in right there which would really darken that background sky without losing any uh detail of the actual Astro so like I said that was from home with a lot of light potion this is from Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania and it was the darkest Skies I've ever seen and this is a 5 minute exposure and you can see the sky is still black uh and you can see a faint nebula here which is the veil nebula this is pre-processed a single frame um and it's uh it's absolutely full of noise because it was a hot it was a hot night and this is a single frame without uh any St to it so like I said about uh bringing the object forward we would need to um stretch the data from the nebula independently from the background sky and the stars to bring it forward without bringing the background Sky forward as well so that that telescope I was talking about that I used for uh for G photography was this one it's just the the baby brother to the one I'm using so I had such a great experience with this explor scientific brand of triplet aall that I just went for the bigger version um because of this Astro backyard thing I I I posted a lot of the uh of my images online and shared a lot of a lot of uh of my my feedback and the owner of explor scientific called me at work uh in early May last year and said I love what you're doing I want to give you uh an amazing deal on the uh on a larger scope to keep going with us and so I said cool I I Googled him to make sure it was actually him the owner of the company and I texted everyone I knew and told them about it all the guys of the astronomy club could believe it so that was kind of uh that was one of that was one early sign that I was doing something right by uh by sharing this with my stuff so there's the new one uh just in my garage there and uh yeah so you might have noticed that it's it's carbon fiber um so that makes it really light uh which is nice for portability if you're traveling to a dark sky site it's uh has a nice PR case uh some larger Scopes that are uh can take amazing images but you don't use them nearly as much because they're such a hassle where you can't lift them easily so the most uh the best telescope is the one you use the most often so uh this gets used pretty much every time it's clear uh thr here and so if you didn't get an amazing deal what would the average Rec for that with the motor drive so how money are you looking at so uh that amount brand new is uh $1,400 conv and that's absolute bottom of the line um basic for astrop photography one and yeah so the mount there and then the telescope itself is $2,000 did you save 2,000 uh I got a good deal I won't say exactly how much it was but I never would have bought it otherwise put that way sorry can you just explain I think like good is the camera built into the telescope or you attach your camera to the tel no uh yeah so it's you attach it to it so how does that work uh so there's an adapter that screws in to the camera body like a lens okay move and then that goes right into the focus draw tube of the scope just like an eye piece would lock in lock there that's okay so um the reason this telescope is was so expensive for its size is the the type of glass used and its design it's known as an APO chromatic refractor uh and so you might hear the term APO come up a lot when it comes to as photography telescopes and the biggest U feature with an APO is the lack of chromatic aberation so this is a photo of the Moon taken with an acromat uh telescope and there's lots of lots of chromatic aberation which is the color fringing around the Moon there and then this photo of the Moon taken through an ail where there's no chromatic aberration at all and it's it's even more so in in bright stars in in a deep Sky image you would there would just be blue Halos around all of them if if it was a cheaper uh telescope design so it's kind of the uh I recommend a scope like this for beginners just to uh put the right foot forward and so you're getting high quality just right off the bat something a little smaller than this um the smaller one that I had I bought used for $800 uh so that's if if you compare that to camera lenses that's that's not a whole lot of money for for what it does so how long would the exposure be in this shop so this is a combined exposure and very short so to get this is this is called Earth shine here so where you can actually see the rest of the Moon lit up because it's reflected off the glow of the earth uh even though it's in the waxing phe so there was one exposure used for the detail on the moon of uh actually very quick it was um 500th of a second because obviously the moon's quite bright in an auto exposure and then longer to get the Earth shine and then combined together to get that full damic which is funny because this is actually really close to what a visual uh first Shin was like through the through the eyepiece It's actually an incredible sight uh during that that main phase okay so yeah speaking uh we covered it a little bit but speaking of uh attaching the camera uh so yeah it just inserts into the draw tube there uh and uh it's just inexpensive adapter that screws into the camera body like a lens and then uh and it can go directly into the telescope and uh as you as you go in and out with Focus uh if you use live view on the camera you'll see the stars uh go in and out of focus and and eventually you can lock it into a sharp focus and you want to use a bright star for that um some of the Brighter Brightest stars in the sky for for it to show up and my you focus all right we're joking around here okay so there is for deep Sky astrophotography you don't go through the eyepiece you just directly into the scope but there is a use for eyepiece and excuse this image this is not a great image of Jupiter but this is when you actually use the camera shooting into the eyepiece because you need that extra magnification of an eyepiece and a Barlo lens that doubles the magnification uh for a small plan because of course if I just shot through the scope with no eyepiece magnification it would just be a a dot on the screen uh so you don't get that crispness that you do of a deep Sky image but uh that's planetary photography I just wanted to to cover it briefly it's not something I specialize in um there's a lot of people that just do this and don't do the Deep sky or or both uh speaking of planetary photography this is the type of telescope that you want to use for for that so this is a 9 in uh Schmid Crain telescope and it has a total length of over 2,000 mm so that gets that real up close view that you want for small galaxies and and planets and and that larger aperture as well it soaks in a lot more light faster so uh but again it's heavy um and uh it's more unforgiving too for beginners with that long focal length any uh any errors in your tracking are going to show real quick uh under that magnification as opposed to a more forgiving a wide field view how we doing for time is the do we need a break or anything or we're okay so the mount itself I discussed how I was able to get that used for a reasonable price so it said that the mount is the most important part of the asop photography rate uh so it tracks the night sky as as you know the Earth is spinning uh so if you just set your camera on a tripod and get a even a 30second exposure of of the night sky you would start to see the stars trailing uh because we're spinning so you need to compensate for this with a a mount such as this one that tracks the night sky and slowly moves with it so that when you do take a 5minute exposure the stars are nice and sharp and they haven't moved because it's moving with it so that's a that's a that's a key part to uh deep sky astrophotography and then and the accuracy of that trapping is there's a lot of of of time and techniques involved with uh getting that more and more and more accurate so it's very it moves so slowly and quietly you don't even you don't realize it's moving unless you saw a time lapse it would be just spinning around uh spinning around slowly uh so this Mount that's that's where what you'll notice in some of the more affordable mounts is that they'll have a limited payload capacity so everything my entire engine weight right now weighs 11 lb which happens to be the exact same weight is this counterweight so it's a perfect balance the scope doesn't have to the uh sorry the mount doesn't have to work too hard to track it's not struggling and uh skipping over any dehs which of course is extremely important when you're doing long exposure photography this picture here is of my larger uh Newtonian telescope uh I don't use it very often uh but it's about as heavy as as this Mount can take uh and it's about 30 lbs with all the Imaging you're attached so this that type of telescope uses a mirror cell at the back and it's a big light bucket uh as opposed to uh the refractor which is more like a a nice camera lens so you're not able to track the night sky if you're not properly polar aligned and luckily for us in the northern hemisphere we have pois the North Star which is almost directly at the North Celestial pole so if you line up the polar axis of the telescope mount with Polaris it's going to spin on the same axis as as the Earth and uh you'll be right in line for for some astrography it's not exactly uh at the North Celestial pole but it's it's very close and so to get even closer we use stuff like the polar scope that's built into the mount and uh in here there's a little star map in there and uh if you're pointing through and looking up FL you can actually see the exact location that you need to move them out so it will uh be completely uh accurately polar aligned and to find out that location for Polaris for any given night I use this app called polar finder so there's the north Celestial polar R in Center as you can see Polaris is spinning around it slowly so on this night uh it uses the GPS on my phone it tells me that for me to be polar line FL would have to be in that position through the polar scope and that's a that's a subtle that's a subtle U adjustment that you would only need for for deep Sky astrophotography if you were just doing visual observations a rough polar FL just fine so on this on the same token of U tracking accurate tracking you may have noticed a smaller telescope writing on top of of the main Imaging scope and this is known as a guide scope so this is used for auto guiding which is a process uh where you this secondary camera the little purple guy on the end here is actually looking through that scope focus it has one job it's focusing on a start in the field of view in the small Stope so and it's connected to your laptop and a software is telling it to keep that star from moving and keep it in the same spot and by doing that it communicates with the mount and makes small adjustments in the mount to be even more accurate it sends little pulse pulse guides to to the Mount and tells it to make Corrections it's a lot of work for a little bit of difference uh but it makes a big difference and it kind of separates the men from the boys uh as far as astrophotography goes and uh I was hesitant to do it at first I said you know I'm I don't need Auto guiding I'm so polar aligned my out solid uh but then when I did it I went from one minute exposures to 5 minute exposures to Beyond you're only limited to your your skies at that point speaking of Auto guiding this scary looking screen here is a software called PhD guiding and it stands for push here dummy so that start this is the view through the finder scope here and those are some stars in the field of view the Crosshair show a star that it's selected and that graph up there is how much that star is moving uh so the smoother that graph is a flat line would mean that it's not moving at all and if it's really Sawtooth and and zigzag which means it's making a lot of Corrections and uh your your your stars may become egg shaped or elongated over a long period of time with us shaky guid so I spent a lot of timeing at that graph uh on the computer while while the camera is running for for better doors okay so this here is the California nebula okay so speaking of exposures really long exposures um we use a high ISO 800 to 1600 or Beyond and uh just to just to maximize that light Gathering ability of of the scope and uh because these objects are are quite dim of course and uh I think what I have this slide here up to talk about that um the actual stacking actually I'll get to that in a minute first let's talk about moisture uh I'll go back to that so if you notice this little strap here that's on the on the telescope objective that heats up so with the changing temperatures throughout the night usually the temperature drops you can get moisture on on the front of your telescope lens and that will eventually result in blurry images so you use a do heater controller here it's got a little switch it plugs in it just heats up very very slow um so that's just uh one of the precautions we take powering the mount up uh when I'm at home everything has AC adapter so I'm able to plug into my host electricity however uh camping or at a dark sky site uh I don't have that luy so I use this uh power box uh it's like a battery battery charger power box and uh it's able to go uh all night long powering um the mount the um laptop and uh the do heaters so there's always a laptop hooked up to the the uh telescope for both uh capturing the images and for running the autoing software the camera that I use so this is a Canon T3i re 23i and um it's an entry level camera and prop sensor um so as you know a crop sensor uh gives you that extra reach uh so you actually times the focal length of the lens by 1.6 which is H beneficial for astrophotography uh so as well as getting that extra reach um a smaller sensor uh fits nicely into the design of the telescope that 2in opening without getting round vetting at the edges is a fullframe camera uh as nice as they are you would you get massive amounts of vignetting due to that big large sensor size it's just not a great fit through a telescope um the Canon 6D is a popular U astrophotography camera but that's more so for camera lens work uh just on on the tracking mount on its own on the camera lens not through a telescope so as far as deep Sky astrophotography through a telescope a propop sensor is uh is the is the clear winner there so it's pretty much just a regular Canon T3i it's picture of T5i but looks the same except it's been modified for Astro photography and all that means is that the IR cut filter has been removed from inside the camera with my old Canon XSI uh so I about an excess ey before the T3i and uh I bought it use for $250 and took close to 50,000 shutter uh actuations on it so I felt comfortable taking it apart uh and removing that IR pet filter myself with an exactor way because worst case scenario I destroy the camera and I just get a a new used Rebel because the thing hold me nothing at that point so there's some very detailed uh instructions online thankfully uh a guy named Gary Honus has an amazing YouTube tutorial and it's took me 7 hours but I was able to remove that UT filter and the reason you do that is because that's blocking out a lot of the red wavelengths of light in that you find in a mission nebula like the uh that large North American nebula P up so once you do that the camera actually picks up a lot more um detail in these deep Sky objects than a Stop Camera would uh so it's it's kind of uh cheating once you once once you figure that out um and it makes a huge difference I shot with a stop camera for for three years thinking that it couldn't make too much of a difference but it was a night day it renders the camera useless for daytime photography everything would have a red tinge to it uh which of course you could adjust later but uh I mean this camera is connected to a scope and outside it all the time I wouldn't I I just use it for as photography keep it separate from my my daytime photography cameras uh so you can do yourself but this T T3i I actually ordered pre-modified from a professional that does offers that service uh I didn't feel like um testing my luck Again by by taking it apart again uh so there are services that modify cameras CR filters this is a light pollution filter that uh if I didn't have this I wouldn't be able to shoot from home at all it would just be uh blown out washed out sky after a minute and a half of uh exposure so this blocks out street lamps uh not car headlights but uh a certain wavelength of artificial lighting uh and again it's something uh very very small that makes a huge difference so a modified camera with a light pollution filter and all of a sudden you're able to open up longer exposures from home uh and capture more more deep Sky up this is the uh Eagle Nebula it's just a good example of what modifying the camera does so with my Stop Camera I got the bright part here that would show up but after modifying it I realized there was there was a mission nebula all around it uh because it just picks up that extra faint stuff that was getting filtered out by the camera um this is this is an image I spent um the most time on uh out of all of them it was over 8 hours and uh it was in the winter too it's a winter object in a Ry called m78 and Winters are notoriously full of clouds and you might get two or three clear nights in an entire season uh so this is just an example of um another accessory called a field flattener so a field flattener goes between the camera uh and the telescope and it flattens the field so that the Stars right to the edges are pin points um because just the way telescopes are designed without that corrector uh Stars near the edge edges start to become elong elongated at the edge uh so you need this extra piece of glass in front of it to flatten the field and uh there's specific models that are are better match for certain Scopes the one I use happens to be optimized for F7 telescopes again something small what is that exactly it's uh this object yeah uh so this is a reflection nebula uh and so the blue part here that's all um gas lit up by the underlying Stars here and that black line in front of it is is dark dust and space um yeah so the the really cool thing about this image is is the dust that's blocking the stars behind it and you can kind of see this uh this this area of nebulosity and and reflection gases so the Stars we know and recognize Bel they outside this this yeah this is a little this is um this isn't near the Orion Nebula where the belt this is up closer um to his left shoulder uh and uh that's kind of the cool thing about too because you see a lot of the same objects IM image so I wanted to do something a little different and I just love the look of reflection nebulas in general the the blue and the uh the blocking dust in front of it so capturing images um a lot of you may already own remote timers uh shutter release uh timers so this is great because you don't touch the camera you're not um disturbing uh the motion and uh you can of course set it to take several several frames one after the other uh so this is kind of the first step into automating uh taking the photos uh through a telescope but as photographers are a crafty bunch and uh so there's a lot of astrophotography specific software available for image acquisition including this software called backyard EOS meant uh just for Canon cameras so it's the reason it's a red screen there is because it's to not disturb your night vision when you're when you're out under the stars red a red wavel doesn't ruin your night vision away white and uh so this is just used to uh set the number of exposures you want to take for for a night set the iso uh and run a series of events uh so you can capture as many um sharp frames on your subject as possible and the reason for that is is that uh there's something called a signal to noise ratio so a standard image frame a single frame is going to be full of noise you're shooting at ISO 1600 that sensor is getting hot it's been exposing for 5 minutes uh so it's just full of noise but the way you can get get around that is by taking several exposures like 30 to 50 when you stack them on top of each other the signal remains there the signal is the is the Deep Sky object and the stars but the noise randomly falls on top of each other in a different pattern and cancels itself so you're able to keep the good data and cancel out the bad data it's incredibly uh it's an incredible feeling to see your image get better and better as you capture more frames and more frames and more frames and that's why you see people capturing 8 and 10 and 15 hours on an object because you're going to uh smooth it out and just keep increasing that signal to noise ratio so here's what some of my uh this is just looking in ad Dolby bridge at some of my image frames and uh like I said so these are 210 second exposures at ISO 800 and that was happened to be as many as I was able to capture them that night I'm not sure if clouds rolled in after that exposure or if it hit my barrage or something so um those the the light frames there uh okay so there's things called support files which in the stacking um phase by adding these files you can improve the quality of your of your final stack image and those dark frames uh that's what they're called Dark frames they shot with the lens cap on and they're the same exposure length and temperature as the light frames so through the telescope with the lens cap on it's a 210c exposure uh at the same temperature shot right after the light frames work those will be loaded in later to the Staffing software to tell the camera what noise is because it's just a read out of the noise created by the camera because the lens crap is on so the software is able to realize what noise is and subtract that from the image again to uh to improve the quality speaking of the Staffing software this is uh happens to be one of the very few free programs there are and probably the most important one it's called Deep Sky stacker unbelievable so when you collect all your precious light frames and dark frames uh you load them up into this uh Magic program and uh it will tell you what your total exposure length is going to be it adds it all up and it registers and stacks all the images so it uses the stars as like registration points and just tiles them all up on top of each other and increases that signal to noise ratio to create a final uh high resolution image that you can then bring into Adobe Photoshop for final processing to stretch and balance and boost saturation in contrast this is the orani nebula and the Running Man nebula captured uh January of this year uh with this telescope that camera and uh it's just over 3 hours worth of exposure and uh I'm in the heart of St cther almost downtown so there's a lot of light pollution but because I stacked all um so much time together and uh was able to keep increasing that signal to noise ratio I was able to Tain the noise uh reduce the the glow of the light pollution and bring forth every square inch of of detail in the uh in the Orion neula I shouldn't say every Square in there's there's much more in there I could go deeper but that's pretty good so you just sorry yes no problem and what were you saying so if you were just to look through the telescope you wouldn't necessarily see this with the nak ey this is probably the best naked eye object to see through the telescope but all you would see is a little bit of and it would be black and white be gray our eyes just can't soak in in the the the colors and uh we just can't exposed like a camera pin and we would just see the glow here and maybe a little bit of the running nebula similar to what uh a one or two second exposure would take that's kind of what your eye sees it's still actually uh very impressive to see this visually um you don't realize it's the scale of it and the structure but uh it's still an impressive site visually over 3 hours the attracted by 15° yes yep uh so mult to get 3 hours was multiple nights I think it was four or five nights actually in total you'd be surprised uh it a combination between uh the seing got bad clouds rolled in or the object uh was hitting a tree or uh I had some uh errors in my guiding so you only keep the best stuff and then you combine all the best stuff together for for your final image and it takes a lot to get to to get that kind of data do you don't have any Le across that well I don't yeah it's very it's uh well I think it's about four full moons across I'm just guessing I know it's a about bat scale but uh it's it's it's large this is almost a fullframe image so you saw what the moon size look like there so it's much bigger than the full moon it's it's it's it's huge how as you finish stacking how many megapixels would an image like this end up need so with the resolution of the T3i it's uh I believe it's 3600 no it's approaching 4,000 uh so I think it's about like 14 megapixels around there um which is uh you know has its limitations like to to print a huge poster of this would be a stretch i' have to dip below the 300 uh DPI threshold for printing uh luckily I most of my stuff stays online on the web so I'm able to keep those uh super sharp smaller versions of of stuff but uh yeah I have done some some larger Prints but about 24x 36 is is about as large as I can print using this camera um and still get the nice crispy results what would be the interval for your individual exposures over the three hour is like every 5 minutes you take a picture yeah yeah uh I think this one was actually 3 minute exposures just to get that histogram in that sweet spot where I showed on the right uh 5 minutes from the backyard at uh iso800 would probably get close to clipping the the data on the right hand side I should mention too this is one of the few objects that you actually need to blend different lengths of exposures because this core is so bright so these are shorter exposures for the core here blended with longer exposures for the outside so I think it was about 3 minutes outside and about uh for the right in the inside core about 30 seconds how often would you take an image like you do let's say you take a 3 minute exposure then you'd wait a while about 5 seconds in between shots oh that's it and the only reason is for the auto guiding software to do something that's called dither which slightly moves the frame over for each sh just to increase the randomness of that noise pattern and it helps in the staing uh and but yeah and the reason that that quick 5-second turnar around before the next shot is just to maximize those clear skies and get as many frames as you can so you said it take 3 hours to get this shot but how much time do you spend in you know goly processing it like Photoshop or whatever program you're using it's it never ends um it's I it's it's hard to call an image final because they're all works in progress uh it's funny because one of the asop photography galleries that I post to it's it forces you to choose is this your final image or a work in progress I've only posted Works in progress I'll never post a final image uh so but yeah it's it's it's um a full I'll spend a full day a full Saturday processing one image uh and going back to it and then the next day realizing like what was [Music] yes okay so I can open it up to some questions I'm sure I left some gaping holes in the process uh I can't see my notes Here go ramble my question is kind of toart uh is there a lot of people doing things like this and if there's not have you been approached by like National Geographic or other B and stuff for your work not I don't have a whole lot of um Publications yet CBC picked up one of my images and tweeted it that was a big one um but just as Dy specific websites have contacted me and I've shared some images there uh but no big exposure yet and there is actually a lot of people doing it it's um it's a smaller group nothing like uh say nature photography would be but uh there's there is there is a well there's at least 6,000 that subscribe to my YouTube channel uh so there's I know there's only Le six, you're not doing this no not doing this sleeping and then going to work but I'm a graphic designer yeah so which came in handy uh being that photoshop is the image processing software so I was extremely comfortable with that uh early on which not a lot of people uh can say the same you're very scientific a scientist yeah oh jeez I'm far far from it and I kind of I feel like I'm on the uh the visual and the art side of of this whole thing um like a lot of people will say like oh what are you looking for are you trying to find a comet or uh following an asteroid I just say you know I just want to take pretty pictures of these amazing objects and uh and show everybody question um why not use a m the would do twice which I just don't have a micro 43s camera some I I don't know a lot of people shooting that yeah no uh there would be benefits to that and for the planetary photography you do want that uh increase even more so crop to get that closer look at the PLS and the other thing is so you you remove the remove the the IR cut filter yeah what a filter the which filter AA filter uh every all the other filters stay intact it's just that one IR cut filter which apparently just removes a a red tinge in daytime op there are filters which because they want to get rid of of one okay there's fil there's a whole world of filters for astrophotography I didn't get into narrow band astrophotography but that block see if this is the full spectrum of of light wavelengths narrow band filters will only capture a specific portion which could be oxygen or hydrogen alpha or uh can't remember what the other one is but so then you're really cre you're combining those to create a oneof a kind image that that you would never come close to seeing through this is just regular standard RGB color true color asop photography what's the uh what's the end objective I mean to do great work but then do that translated into any sort of commercial uh opportunity um either to sell individual prints or for public lots of opportunity yet so the goal for me I guess with this the whole point of the thing is that I'm just uh I know I'm going to be doing it for the rest of my life so the as I've had to monetize the hobby uh through Astro backyard and uh it's just through advertising on the YouTube channel right now it may lead to uh seminars and workshops uh that's that's a road but uh I'm just trying to come up with ways to sustain the hobby right now and and to justify the amount of time spent uh yeah it's uh what time did you go out like midnight it's all based on weather yeah um it could start if it's just a clear night all night I'll I'll come home from work set up when I get home and leave it running all night and uh run in and out of the house and uh drive for crazy in my dog uh in and out of the back door making sure everything's running okay get 2 hours of sleep going to work like a zombie but uh also know that I have data sitting on my computer or something like this and uh I'll I'll keep doing it every time do you have to work tomorrow yeah so it's an hour and half back to yeah it's it was worth it no yeah know I hope say cloudy so I buil free just go home so so you're mon monetizing this through your YouTube site my question for you is how many other as photographers have that exact same shot well none have that exact shot uh but a lot a lot of people um well specifically this image is is probably the most photographed object uh that there is and so there's a lot of people doing it but they like to keep their secrets and there's something about this hobby where they don't want to share share the secrets how they got it they want everyone to look at it and to say how great it was but uh don't don't worry about how my processing Secrets but I share everything so I think that's what's different about it and uh so for the guys that were on the fence about doing it because they kind of got scared off by a bad conversation in a forum see my video where they say well if he can do it I think I can do it and uh I had some great help early on that I knew I had to pay it forward and return them to the community do they still sell clock workes so uh yeah there's um there was so many different types of uh trackers including homemade Barn Door trackers that you screw manually manually to uh to keep it with the motion of the sky they keep getting smaller there's a lot of options for uh just using the camera with with a small lens like a travel size that you can put on top of a a tripod uh so you don't have to have this big clunky thing out with you but uh it's just in the last seven years the rography products have just went through the roof there's more options than ever in and that filter is there an additional filter that compensate for having to that so if you want to keep your cameras yes there is yeah yep there's uh I can't remember what the filter is called but yeah it's a replacement filter so uh it's it's protecting the uh the camera and the other filters out but it just doesn't remove that wavelength that the IR cut filter does and and then yeah you can use it for daytime T that that method is more expensive uh and the only reason this modification is called a naked sensor because I removed that that filter and just left It Wide Open the only reason I get away with that is because that light pollution filter on top that's always screwed on the that protects that sensor from uh from the elements is your dog your security he is is it I see said it's outside there you're in and out type thing and somebody be coming along and know but you R something very expensive he's his his bed is right next to the back door and the slightest noise at all back there and he goes berserk so it's it's perfect and he does berserk very often so question TR R that's something you have to get over early on is the creepiness of being out the in the backyard in complete darkness you want to avoid all white lights so you you really can't see anything and uh yeah have raccoons um climbing the fence give me a scare uh you smell a skunk back there that's never good um yeah it's it's all kinds of stuff when you're up there creeping around not to mention your neighbors seeing you point like sometimes the scope is pointing over my neighbor's house but it kind of looks like it's pointing into their window and they just see me fiddling back there they have no idea what I'm doing and uh you know coming outside at 3:00 a.m. I'm just I have no idea what they think I'm doing but so I'm prepared tell and explain my story if they ever asked have you ever uh obviously if you go sou of the Equator you get another whole part of the universe to look at if you've done that I'd love to see the southern hemisphere objects they have a lot of amazing stuff um one of it one of which being the core of the Milky Way Rises straight up overhead so what we get here in the northern northern hemisphere it kind of uh it kind of goes across the Horizon with the core just poking up over it so the lower you get to the Earth the more atmosphere you're looking at so we don't get the greatest View at some of the really uh greatest Milky Way objects but they get that in the South so I definitely want to take a trip uh Australia would be nice I'm sure could be catching airplanes and shooting stars and satellites it's a good way to ruin an image frame and you get an airplane right across it it's just streaks of the light flash yep or satellites too and then you just got to ditch that frame and you don't get to use it more often than you would think there's a lot of satellites up there oh bats bats was the really creepy one you don't realize how many bats are in a residential neighborhood until you're setting up the scope at dust looking up and you just see the flickering across the sky and screeching past your head too okay so I've Tak has been a would that uh so we cancel it out I I don't risk it trying to stack it uh I think it would there's certain algorithms you can choose and one of them is to say uh okay this is in this ring and not in any of the others so don't include it um I haven't got into that algorithm so I just Stitch the FR I guess if I was if I really wanted it and it was a really long exposure and I didn't have many I'd probably look into it what would you suggest to people who have just starter cameras they don't have any in this kind of equipment and they want to do a little bit of like photography I I would start with uh 30 second exposures on a tripod of the Milky Way during the summer okay so the summer looking so is the best time to see the absolute most in the sky it dark the darkest place you can find okay look so In Summer with a wide field lens on F4 or lower if you can a 30C exposure you will see some star Trail but you'll also see the glow of the Milky Way in the air uh and that's something anyone with a with a entry level DSLR and a tripod could do okay thank you no problem how do you deal with hot spots on the center um the sensor over time uh so those usually will get uh removed in the satin uh phase incredible to see uh not to mention just if you're visually looking through a telescope and you're a high magnification view of the moon and the the the scope is not tracking the Moon is moving this fast like you really realize how fast we're actually spinning uh when you get into those magnifications looks like we Le a lot of astronomy I did yeah it's uh yeah it's unbelievable stuff very very interesting and like I said in that astronomy club as well and it's uh it's in Niagara thec the RO Astronomical Society Canada you're oh Falls for yeah I me spotlights shining into the like advertising the casinos like it's just not even possible well with the with the statment software let's say for example you've got 20 or 30 images sometimes right M that you stacked together M uh what once it's stacked together what what what's an average size of the the the image that you work that you bring in the Photoshop uh they big 100 megabytes 100 megabytes and uh yeah it is a 32bit tiff plow that it creates uh so you start with that you make your initial adjustments and then actually you have to convert it to 16bit to open up a lot of the the Photoshop processing options because it won't uh it won't do a lot of the stuff um and as for Photoshop there's um astrop photography action packs to make the processing uh easier so it will record an action of um it will just be called make stars smaller and it will go through select all the stars to put a mask on them and reduce them all in one like action so um yeah just it's a whole uh industry of there's there's another monetizing option is making my own Master the Action Tax nice digital product or an ebook I eventually want to do it looks like you should be able to S images quality M generally like Canadian nature yeah it's it's you don't see a lot of it everywhere you see in the astronomy magazines but uh yeah I'm going to I'm going to do my best to to get up there anyone yeah yeah not surrounding base but yeah a lot of the stuff which there's a whole area for photography and stock houses okay such as ice stock images uh and so on there's dozens of them around the world those images have to be of interest to editors Publishers time y I'm I'm with iock shutter stock Folia um dreams time and uh yeah it's there it's a little bit of extra money um I'm telling you what you already know right yeah yeah no and uh some of some these images sell but I I sell more stock images of um someone picking up a phone or just general stock images yeah one of my most sold images is of her holding uh a beer can by the campfire just her handh holding a beer can and it's my top selling photo so the stock photography world I don't know I I can't figure it out so um you heard gravitational gravitational uh heard of it um oh uh which which one was it the Galaxy yeah okay this one no I'm looking for one that has two a pair of stars on side tell meone to stop yeah to see the two stars too way too far way too far I think I was the first you show okay never mind it may have that lights yep oh yeah this is really hard to see [Music] yeah sorry okay sorry you we had one two stars on one almost tical Stars I see so they were actually the same two stars probably same but I I wonder okay now I know what you're talking about yes Hub has has lots of deep views of stuff like that um if I've taken any images of that I didn't know it yeah so uh I think that's going to do it and U so it's Astro backyard is uh is the brand I've created around this and uh so YouTube and Facebook and if you want to follow what I'm doing there uh if you just Google Astro backyard will come up and uh yeah you'll be able to see my dog uh in the back there he's in a lot of the videos he's a fan favorite uh so yeah thanks thanks for having me and letting me uh be out about all this stuff even though your photography club got very astronomy based but uh I am taking pictures so hopefully it was of interest to you

Channel: AstroBackyard

Views: 123,752

Keywords: astrophotography, camera, telescope, beginner, how to, what you need, tips, settings, equipment, setup, basic, photography, mount, DSLR, Canon, Milky Way, Stars

Id: CGDjGh-j37Q

Length: 66min 48sec (4008 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2017