How To Find ANY Deep Sky Object

One of the most frustrating things when you're  just starting out in DSLR astrophotography is   not being able to find the galaxy or nebula you  want to shoot or even worse thinking you found   it only to stack your images the next day and  realizing you weren't actually pointed at it   in this video we're going to look at the very  best tried and true methods for finding deep   sky objects and then I'll show you a crucial  final step that will allow us to confirm we're   pointed in the right spot even when the object  is completely obscured by heavy light pollution   hello i'm Nico and this channel is all about  helping people learn the amazing hobby of amateur   astrophotography my website is nebulaphotos.com  and if you like what you see consider joining us   over on Patreon which starts at just one dollar  per month so the topic today is something that   can be super frustrating even for me who has been  doing astrophotography for several years now and   that's the issue of actually finding and framing  up a deep sky object like a galaxy or a nebula   that you can't actually see sometimes until you  process it on the computer so how do we find   something we can't see well for astrophotography  through the star patterns and you can think of   star patterns as being sort of like landmarks when  giving directions just like you could tell someone   when you see the blue house take a left in the  night sky we could say when you see these three   bright stars in a line that's Orion's belt  so just follow those up this way until you   see this triangle of stars and then you're on your  object and there are two main ways to use the star   patterns and we're going to use them both tonight  the old school but still very reliable way is a   process called star hopping which is basically  looking at a star atlas or planetarium app that   charts the stars and then looking at your camera  and the night sky and finding out what direction   you need to move to get closer and closer to your  target until you're there and the hopping part   is we use bright stars to make a few hops from one  bright star to the next until we're there and that   makes the whole thing a lot easier once you get  used to it and i want to say this is a crucial   skill that i'd really encourage everyone to learn  i'm going to be demonstrating it of course in this   video but it's a skill that really rewards actual  practice and patience under the night sky the new   school way which also uses the star patterns is  actually to turn your photo over to some computer   software called a plate solver that looks at  the image and based on the patterns of the stars   solves it meaning it figures out  exactly where in the sky you're pointed   and it will actually label the bright stars and  you know galaxies and nebulae that appear in   the photo and so the ultimate solution i found is  actually using both methods because we don't want   to just be constantly plate solving that takes  a lot of time so we're going to star hop until   we get in the right general direction and when we  think we're pretty close we'll use plate solving   with a free website called astrometry.net to make  sure we're really in the right spot and if needed   we can fine tune from there before we jump outside  let me just give you a quick rundown of the kind   of gear books apps all that kind of stuff that  is most helpful for finding objects and what   i'll be using tonight for the demo is a canon  camera and lens on a skywatcher star adventurer   but this demo will work with just a fixed tripod  it'll work with different kinds of cameras   you don't need the tracker so it's really just  that's what i'm going to be using to show it next   up let's talk about finder devices and the idea  of a finder device is it makes it easier to get   immediate feedback of where you're pointed in the  night sky and for star hopping this is critical   because it'll help you to get to that first bright  star quickly so one thing we have here this is   a green laser finder and so it just is a green  laser you can see so this one is from scope stuff   and it has the finder shoe attachment so i can  easily put it on top of my DSLR just like that   and this is just one example of a finder device  you can get i do like the green laser but check   with your local laws on using them because  in some places they're forbidden or illegal   and also never use one near a major flight  path or when you see an airplane in the sky   because you don't want to blind a pilot on the  very inexpensive end this is a little pricey we   have something else called a red dot finder this  works very similarly instead of seeing the green   light like that you just see a little red dot  in the middle here and you can cite your object   easily and then a little bit more expensive than  a red dot finder and quite a bit bigger is a tell   rad but this makes a full red target that's that's  really easy to see on the night sky so this would   be more for like a telescope no matter what kind  of finder you use it's important to make sure it's   calibrated so that the finder and the camera lens  are actually pointed in the same spot and i always   do this calibration at home with the green laser  you would just you know shine the green laser   against a wall and then just make sure that it  lines up on your camera's view screen right in   the center of the live view if you're using a red  dot finder same idea you just adjust these little   screws until it's all lined up with whatever you  have centered on the camera's view screen okay   next thing we need is some kind of star chart or  sky atlas and i always keep physical paperback   star atlases but mostly as a backup the truth is  i don't use these kinds as much these days because   the phone apps just offer so many more features  on the high end i really like sky safari pro it   often goes on sale so i'd wait for a sale if  you haven't purchased it yet but it just has   tons of cool features including letting me have  a big database of my gear so i can put overlays   which are a field of view to get an idea with  different cameras and lenses and telescopes   and i mentioned this because it can  be really useful also for star hopping   because you can see exactly how star patterns  will look on the screen on your camera screen   if you do want to do this fov indicator for free  stellarium on the computer will do all this too   and i'm going to be doing a stellarium video  pretty soon i think um so i'll talk more about   that but the app i'll be using tonight is a free  one it's called sky i think it's android only but   many apps will do what it does it's basically just  a sky map and as i move the phone around it uses   the phone's compass and gyroscope to figure out  roughly where i'm pointed now unfortunately i have   found this isn't super accurate it's just sort  of roughly accurate partly because i think any   things that metallic or magnetic fields in  the area will throw it off and so there are   a few things that this app suggests doing to  improve the accuracy one is to wave your phone   in a figure eight motion to calibrate the internal  sensors in the phone and the other is it suggests   adding alignment points when you know you're  centered on certain stars and so you'll see me   doing that in the demo i'm not sure how much  it really helps but maybe it'll help a little   bit i should also mention in the demo you'll see  that my phone is going to be attached in a phone   holder thing like this attached to an l bracket  right next to the camera i don't actually   recommend this setup um it makes it easier to film  what i'm doing but i think all this metal pieces   is throwing off the magnetic compass so a better  way to make it sort of a side-by-side adapter like   this would be purely out of wood and plastic so  i might do that see if it helps but i haven't   gotten around to it yet so other than telling  us roughly where we're pointed i can also search   in the app for whatever deep sky object we're  trying to find this is where there are lots of   differences in the different planetarium apps both  in how many objects they have in their database   and does it require a data connection for the  search to work because some will download the   whole catalog some won't so i'd suggest evaluating  this in different apps before heading out   somewhere remote another reason i'm willing to  pay for sky safari pro is that it's still fully   functional without a data connection and it has  a huge database of stars and deep sky objects   but back to the free eyes sky when we want to find  something we can just click this little menu icon   click search and then tonight i'll be demoing  messier 81 so in that case we just click the   messier tab then search 81 and tap it and now  you may be wondering why not just start with that   instead of star hopping well i found that that can  work okay for really bright easy to find objects   like andromeda or orion or the lagoon which  are sort of easy to find even without a phone   and i've made videos about using it in this  basic way but for harder to find stuff star   hopping will be more reliable and we can use star  hopping in conjunction with this app and i'll show   that in the demo okay i'm out on the field i've  just finished polar aligning the star adventurer   you can see polaris is centered on the camera  here i also centered it on the app and with my   green laser and now i'm going to go ahead  and loosen up the ra clutch and then the   deck clutch and get us pointed at our first  star in our star hopping which is going to be   dubi which is part of uh the big dipper pretty  easy to find i'm just gonna do some fine alignment   here with uh both axes until i get it sort of  centered on the dslr screen and i'm just turning   off and on my laser to do this to know where i'm  pointed now instead of going to m81 which i could   from here i'm going to hop to a different star in  ursa major because that will give me a feel for   sort of how the directions with ra and dec work  so i'm going to go over here to this 23 ursa major   and i've got i've gone ahead and found that  so now i'm going to go ahead and head to   m81 um and i'm just using my app to sort  of give me an idea of the direction here   i'm actually going to overshoot a little bit  because i want to show you the fine-tuning thing   a little bit more okay so i'm going to take a test  exposure just a one second test exposure i'm gonna   do this at high iso so i can really see the star  as well and then i'm gonna go ahead and get that   picture that test exposure onto my phone and i'm  going to first show doing this with the canon   connect app uh which is a little bit uh difficult  you have to put it on its own wi-fi network   and then go through a couple steps here it's not  too bad it's gotten a lot better over the years   i'm also going to show a way to do this without  wi-fi camera connect so don't worry i'll show   that at the end um so here we go here's all  the pictures i can take them in raw and still   import them as a reduced jpeg which is  great that's what i'm going to do here and now that it's on my phone i'm going to go  ahead and open up um or first i'm going to turn   off the wi-fi on my phone so that it's connecting  back to mobile data and then i'm going to open up   google chrome and go to nova.astrometry.net upload  and click on choose the file i'll just find it on   my phone here under files it's the most recent  file this uh jpeg and i'll upload it to this   website and this is the plate solver so this is  going to actually figure out exactly where i'm   pointed right now and it takes a couple minutes  i'm going to speed up this part of the video but   it'll sort of give you a little update as it goes  and when it's all done plate solving it will say   success and then give you an option to go to  the results and so we'll go ahead and do that and here's what we see and i  can see right from this little   thing right here that we're not yet on m8192 so  how do we know how to get there from here well i'm   going to show you one way to do it which is i'm  going to open up the view in worldwide telescope   option so over here on the right hand side click  on this link that says view in worldwide telescope   and it'll show you something like  this it'll zoom in at first so just   you know zoom back out by double finger sort  of swipe and i can see m8182 right there   and i can see there's my camera view screen  the bottom is right there with this pink line   and so i need to move the stars down about one  full camera sensors uh height to get to m8182   so i find this really useful because it gives me  an idea of how the camera's sensor is oriented   on the sky and then i can know which direction  i need to move the stars to get to my target   if you're close that is if you're further away  then you're gonna have to go back to star hopping   but when you're this close we can just sort of  know okay if i move uh in this direction about   this far i'll be right on so i just have to move  the top uh stars down to the bottom and a little   bit off the sensor and then i'll be right on  m8182 so let's figure out the direction we have   to do it and it looks like i have to move in this  direction to make the stars go down so i'm going   to go ahead and do that until they start at the  top is going right off the bottom of the screen   and then i should be right on m81/82 let me go  ahead and take another test exposure at high iso and there we go and again because we're in  this heavy light pollution i don't know if i   can really see 81/82 here but when i plate solve  it yep there they are right in the middle of the   screen as we would expect oh so and then i'm going  to go ahead and open it up in worldwide telescope   and i want to show you this little image  crossfade thing because that's pretty cool   so there's this little image crossfaded here  at the bottom the slider and i can just very   quickly see there's m81/82 and there's my  picture and you can see that you know if you   really knew where to look you could find them  in the picture but they're almost invisible um   because they're really just little these faint  smudges and they're quite small at the focal   length i'm at so that gives you an idea i want  to mention the the method that i'm going to use   here is the last example that we're going to do  which is what to do if you don't have wi-fi on   your camera so you can't easily transfer images  to your phone this method was shared with me by   a 13 year old astrophotographer named arcturus  astro who told me about this on a live stream and so the way we're going to do it is instead of  transferring we're just going to take a picture   of our DSLR's screen in playback mode you want  to make sure that if you if there's any info   displayed on the screen that you turn all of that  off and you turn off the flash on your camera and   then just get as close as possible make sure  to tap on the screen so that it focuses there   and sets the exposure there and then go ahead and  open that picture up in your app and crop it down   so that you just have the screen and nothing  else so we're just going to crop it just like   this be pretty careful to get as much as we can  but nothing else crop perfect and then click save and then we're going to upload that to  astrometry.net of course the cropped picture that   we just took of the screen and i have tried this  a number of times now and it's worked every time   so i'm quite impressed with astrometry.net and  this method that was shared to me by a curse astro   of just taking a picture of your screen and i  think it's actually what i'll do in the future   rather than dealing with the canon app because  this is just really easy and it seems to always   work so that's it for this video hope you enjoyed  you can see some of my other videos here linked   and also join us on Patreon and make sure to  subscribe if you haven't see you next time

Channel: Nebula Photos

Views: 57,504

Rating: 4.9647708 out of 5

Keywords: astrophotography, astronomy, canon astrophotography, dslr astrophotography, dslr astrophotography for beginners, stars, star photography, night sky photography, nebula photos, nico carver, nico carver astrophotography, nico nebula photos, budget astrophotography, canon t7, how to find a galaxy, how to find a nebula, astrometry.net, dslr platesolving, plate solving, cell phone plate solving, star hopping, how to find m81

Id: 8MF8DByj_Po

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021