Live: Astrophotography Basics

holy Wow we didn't expect this many people welcome so welcome to another edition of our free lecture series we're putting on here at the rocky mountain school of photography tonight we got the pleasure of our co-director of the school or Chaput talking about Astro photography and one thing to mention for those of you tuning in on YouTube any questions you have put them down in the comment section and I will answer them to the best of my ability if I can't I'll give you everyone his email to everybody enjoy and if you guys have questions you just raise your hands a lot of you learn from me before you know the drill I like interruptions because I think it clarifies things for everyone so don't feel like shy like you have to withhold your questions till the end so feel free to ask away I do want to say one thing I'm kind of not required but I'm going to do this B and H for years we've had a relationship with them they're a great camera store for those you guys who don't know and for years we've also had people requesting to livestream these lectures we've never had the equipment we needed to do it this year I reached out to B and H to ask if they wanted to sponsor these lectures and they said yes so this is those of you watching live that's because of a B and H partnership they made that happen so thank you to being H do you guys want to buy camera gear buy it from B&H because they're great and the cool thing is for those of you guys watching here in the room if you guys want a review on what I cover it's recorded live on our YouTube channel so it'll be there forever so that's kind of nice cool deal all right so without without delaying anymore I want to start talking about Astro photography now I love Astro photography it's one of my favorite things and I think the reason I like it so much is it's one of those types of photography that you can go as in-depth as you can possibly imagine into it I've probably spent legitimately a thousand hours researching and doing Astro photography and I still feel like I've probably know and done about 10% of what there is to do it's a crazy big giant aspect of photography that I if you guys know my dad I like gear just like he does it's also very gear centric but the cool thing is and the thing that I want to focus on tonight is how to do Astro photography without buying additional stuff we will talk a little bit at the end if you want to go further with it what to purchase but a lot of people don't realize that with the gear that you have you can do really cool astrophotography which is awesome now the first thing I want to do is talk a little bit about what I see astrophotography as being what is astrophotography because I think a lot of people use different definitions of it to me and there's gonna be arguments here that need to be had and that's okay to me astrophotography is not star trails and wide shots of the Milky Way that to me is night photography for me Astro photography is when you're coming up close in on galaxy's nebulas star constellations you're really only shooting celestial objects that's to me what Astro photography is now there are their arguments there for sure would people think that Milky Way and star trails are Astro photography yes and that's totally fine but to me that's what I want the focus of this to be on is coming in closer kind of the more advanced level of night photography compared to what most people do so that's what we're gonna talk about but in order to do that we need to talk a little bit about basic star trails and Milky Way photography so we'll start with that then we'll transition in the more complex stuff and we'll go as deep down into that as we get so it should be pretty fun first thing I want to do though is look at some examples of Astro photography alright and and the different types there are now I want to say one thing if you see an image on the screen and it does not have a copyright symbol in the lower right hand corner I took it if it does have a copyright symbol I'm attributing to who took it I did not shoot all of the images in this presentation because like I said I have that thousand hours of experience there are people way better than me who've taken a lot longer to do this so I want to show off their work as well so lunar photography for sure is Astro photography who's taking a picture of the moon alright did it work kinda what did you notice about the moon compared to what you thought might happen it moves for sure that's important what else contrast it's really bright you guys what's lighting up the moon the Sun what's lighting up the earth on a bright sunny day the Sun so the moon is as bright as the earth is on a bright sunny day well when you normally shoot the moon at nighttime so you see that contrast right you're shooting the moon with a dark sky around it and the moon is being illuminated by the Sun so there's a lot of contrast there that's why you always see the moon against a totally black sky because there's so much contrast there to get them both together a lot of people don't realize that solar photography alright that's a really awesome shot of the Sun and you guys can see sunspots and solar flares and things like that you need very special filtration to do this don't do this without special filtration who shot the Eclipse was it fun did anyone who went to like totality like actually went to the path of totality awesome like so amazing it gets cold like oh my gosh it was once-in-a-lifetime experience very cool so solar photography definitely legitimate type of Astro photography a wide field milky way shot so you guys can see a lot of astrophotographers will come in and grab just one chunk of that right just grab a nebula or just grab a galaxy but a lot of photographers this was probably shot with maybe a hundred millimeter lens pretty wide lens comparatively obviously they're not using like a 2,000 millimeter telescope or something like that but with a pretty normal lens that most people own with enough pictures and enough data which we'll talk about you can get really cool stuff like that coming up really close so this is very very close in this is a lot of time on the sky a lot of integration time as we'll talk about and that's a that's a nebula or a star forming region so pretty darn cool galaxies this is the if I believe it's the Whirlpool Galaxy this is a hard thing to shoot I spent six hours of time shooting this galaxy so my camera was shooting six hours worth of exposure time on that target and I'll show you the photo that resulted from six hours in a little bit I'll give you a hint it doesn't look anything like this like this is probably like a hundred hours or two hundred hours of exposure time Oh night after night after night after night all right there's the Andromeda galaxy our nearest galactic neighbor this is for those of you who want to get started in Astro photography and don't necessarily want to buy some gear this is what I would start with this is one of those easier targets that's you can actually see it with the naked eye who's looked up and seen it you is anyone seen it it just looks like a little fuzzy blob you can see it it's pretty cool that's one of our nearest galaxies our nearest galaxy the Andromeda galaxy the Andromeda galaxy another nebula here all right also planetary photography it's totally a thing this was shot by a amateur astronomer it was on celeste Ron's website using one of their little cameras with people do with with planetary photography is they shoot shot after shot after shot like thousands of images very very quick shutter speed very very fast like they actually shoot video of the planets and what they do with that is they stack them all together because if you think about it you guys what are you battling when you shoot a planet what's gonna make that image look blurry movement for sure but if you have a tracking mount that's gonna track with it what is it that's making it blurred atmosphere the atmosphere itself and so what you can do is you can shoot shot after shot after shot after shot that averaged out to being no blur from the atmosphere so people shoot thousands tens of thousands of images and stack them to get sharp things like that all right so those are some example images we'll talk about how to get those right now all right first thing let's talk a little bit about the motions of the sky because you need to know what's causing the what what battle we have to fight as astrophotographers what we're up against when we do this all right so the Earth rotates under the stars hopefully you didn't think that the Stars rotate around the earth and were fixed in space that was the thoughts of a few hundred years ago we've moved past that and all the stars appear to rotate around a fixed point so in the northern hemisphere what do we call that fixed point the North Star right or Polaris Polaris is kind of its fancier name in the southern hemisphere they have the Southern Cross count yourself lucky it's way easier to find the North Star than the Southern Cross like it's it's a much simpler task and that's awesome we call that point that North Star the North Star is not quite right on it it's really close the North celestial Pole that's essentially that's the point where all the stars rotate around appear to rotate around from our position we're really rotating under them all right and what this does you guys is this gives us star trails now star trails are a beautiful thing in themselves but like I said night's goal is to fight that is to battle the star trail behavior and give ourselves something to work with that doesn't have blurred stars we want sharp nice pointy stars alright so here's the thing if you want sharp point stars and that's a term that I'm gonna use again and again tonight we can do one of two things we can use a short enough shutter speed meaning that our shutter is not open long enough for the star to move in appreciable distance we can do that or we can get a tracking mount which are like what you see up here and up here which is like a little motorized tracker that moves with the sky and keeps things centered for you keeps the stars in the frame and these can run anywhere from like $300 on that end to like that's more like $700 to like hundreds of thousands of dollars if you want to go to like the ultra ultra high-end but that lets you use super long shutter speeds and still get point stars that's the goal here alright so here's a little diagram we can see we have the South celestial pole North celestial pole and basically the way to think of where those are you just extend a straight line up from the North Pole of the earth into the sky and from the South Pole and then we have this thing called the celestial equator which is if we extended a plane out in all directions through the earth's equator and those are terms we use and astronomers use quite a bit to talk about where things are on the sky so that's kind of a useful terminology to get as you start doing more astrophotography all right so let's start by talking about basic night photography all right let's just dump in and do a little bit of star trails Milky Way stuff because there's some topics there that you guys need to understand in order to fully get the Astro stuff okay so let's start with star trail images I think they're awesome they're pretty great but they're not what we're here for primarily but I do want to spend some time so let's look at a few of those so this is in Death Valley National Park and you guys can see which direction am I facing or is the North Pole in the frame let me ask an easier question no how do we know yeah there's two there's no circle right the North Pole is where do you think from this image it's that this is in Death Valley National Park so we're in Northern Hemisphere so it's got to be up there right it's rotating around that side that would be the southern pole down there below the equator if we were below the equator all right we can start to put things in the front this is the garden of a thousand buddhas in our li and you guys can see there's little breaks in my stars that's because clouds were running in front of my star trail so you can get cool effects like that sometimes alright another one now here again North Star upper right right you can pretty clearly see everything's rotating around that point also you can see there's a little either a shooting star or sometimes that's actually sunlight reflecting off of a solar panel on a satellite which is really cool if you get a satellite going by and the sunlight reflects perfectly and you get it in your shot like I kid you not that's what you can get sometimes it's very very cool alright another one here we can see I'm actually on the equator or pretty close to the equator here so everything's moving pretty straight I'm aiming either east or west so everything's straight lined all right another one another one alright so how do we shoot these well there's two ways to shoot star trails who's done it before okay how'd it go pretty good okay cool the two ways to do it are a single exposure versus a multiple exposure and they both have their pros and cons there's there's reasons to use one of those reasons to use the other one let's talk first about single exposure star trails why we might want to do a single exposure alright what we're gonna do is we're gonna basically and you guys it's a lot easier if you have like a cable release or a you if your camera happens to have the time mode where you push the button once to start the exposure you push it again to stop the exposure most cameras don't have that though so a cable release with a lock can help you can put your camera on bulb lock open the shutter for an extended period of time all right that's what you're gonna do with a single exposure now you want to leave your shutter open for a while how how long do you think what do you guys think how long should we leave our shutter open for what is it depend on sunrise for sure yeah you don't want to go til the Sun rises but what else what are you gonna get the longer you leave your shutter open for longer trails exactly so I would say for me I shoot for a minimum of about 20 minutes anything shorter than 20 minutes it kind of looks like an accident right it looks like you just blurred your stars a little bit and you didn't mean to when you get to 20 minutes and longer you get really nice trails most of the ones I just showed you guys were about an hour hour and a half they were pretty long good trails now it very much depends which part of the sky you're pointing on because if you're pointing toward the North Pole the North celestial pole the stars are going to move less in the same amount of time because they don't have as far to travel remember every star is going to do one full rotation in 24 hours so if you go close to that circle you're gonna get much less movement in your hour than you will if you're like pointing toward the celestial equator so depending where you're pointing you can do different things there are some cool apps out there that actually show you depending where you're looking on the sky how long of a trail you'll get per a given amount of time it's kind of a cool way to do it all right now stars moving over heads recorded on the sensor throughout that duration of the exposure all right and like I said more time with the shutter open gives you longer trails pretty simple stuff now big advantage here you don't have any post-processing when you're done and when you close that shutter obviously you can brighten or darken and do things like that but I mean there's no required post-processing of you once the image is done the star trail is built and that's great but there's a cost what do you guys think think the downside is what's the disadvantage noise right noise is that random variation kind of looks like film grain from back in the day right only its ugly not pretty like film grain used to be and it's it's not a very pleasing look for the image and what does noise what causes noise you all do you know what causes it it's heat it's heat in your sensor and heat in the sensor is generated one of two ways one way is duration of exposure the longer the exposure you go the more heat you're gonna get the other way is the ambient temperature obviously if you have a higher ambient temperature like you're outside in the middle of the summer and it's 85 degrees outside you're gonna get way more noise than if it's the middle of winter and it's negative and I love observing and doing astrophotography this time of year because it gets dark early and it's cold and the sensor loves it when it's cold you get way less noise which is super awesome all right so you're fighting noise when you do this so that's why multiple exposures are better for some people now I got to be honest with you guys about five years ago I told everyone to do the multiple exposure route because you got less noise doing it that way these days if you have a new fancy-pants camera that's super awesome a lot of them can do a single exposure and have still very little noise a usable amount of noise and then you cut out that whole post-processing element of the multiple exposure way so I recommend you test it you see what your camera is capable of whether single exposure or multiple is better all right now with multiple exposures what you're gonna do is you're gonna shoot a lot of faster exposures and you're gonna stack them in Photoshop I actually have a video on our YouTube channel on how to do this on how to do the stacking in Photoshop process so check that out if you want to know how to do this process but what you want to do is you want to make sure the gap between your exposures is short y-yea breaks in the trail and who's seen that anyone seen breaks in their trails okay and it's ugly it's like you get a little trail segment and then a little break and then a trail segment then a break and we'll look at that in a second okay so you want to make sure that gap is short you want to set your camera to continuous drive mode right that essentially means that as long as you're holding down the shutter it will keep click click click click click over and over and over and over again okay you really need an intervalometer or a cable release to do this like I said you really want something that will continuously hold down that shutter button for you keep taking picture after picture after picture after picture all right and then you combine them in Photoshop which honestly is like a 10-minute task if you don't if you know nothing about Photoshop and this is a true story for those of you who I've heard some grumblings in the world about Adobe forcing everyone to switch to a subscription-based model there's definitely some grumblings out there the one good thing about that is that you get Photoshop included with your Lightroom fee right and having to pay monthly for Lightroom gives you photoshop now you can make start trails yes right like if there's one thing you need photoshop for there it is right there all right I like this method I know that with my camera specifically the multiple exposure mode looks better than one solid shot but again that remains to be seen there's a lot of really good low-light performing cameras that do an excellent job so yes so that depends I usually will do 30-second exposures is my go to duration cuz that's a if you guys look on your cameras most cameras that's as long as you can go like as long as you can actually set on your cameras 30 seconds so I usually do 30 seconds and duration completely depends on how much trail you want so usually an hour hour and a half of 30-second exposures right so if you're gonna do an hour of 30-second exposures that's you take 120 frames you put them all together in Photoshop yep yep exactly all right now this will give you gaps in your stars and a lot of people think yeah right Forrest you have a 1 second gap between your 30 second exposures there's no way you're gonna see caption your stars you're wrong there is let's look so you guys see this image it looks great right no gaps everything smooth let's zoom in whoo right look at that gap gap gap gap gap gap all the way up this was about a half a second gap between exposures half a second and the star moved enough that the camera registered it so you really want to make sure it's going click click click like well not obviously that fast 30 seconds between each one but as soon as one 32nd chunk is over you want the next one to start right away all right so you get gaps now questions on star trails before we move on to points pretty simple basically you decide whether you want to do single exposure or multiple if you want to do single point your camera somewhere lock it open and wait if you're doing multiple point the camera somewhere put it on 30 seconds and lock the shutter down and it'll keep firing 30 seconds over and over and over again yes yes that's a great question so yeah you guys if you're going to do these using an intervalometer if you're gonna shoot your the multiple exposure method using an intervalometer set that gap to zero or to one however little it will let you do you really want it to just fire fire fire fire fire yep over and over and over again great question all right star points what this essentially is for the next little bit is going to be how we get sharp nice pointy round stars now the first bit of this is going to be specifically in regards to the Milky Way how we would shoot nice wide shots of the Milky Way who's done this before how did it go pretty cool right kind of so so might be me your your eyes didn't see what your camera saw maybe your camera saw more than what your eyes saw I know for me when I'm shooting the Milky Way it usually looks really good on the back of my camera I'm like super jiving with what I see back there and then I get home and I look on the computer I'm like ah it's kind of blurry and things aren't great there's definitely a little bit of a mismatch there so we'll talk about that alright if you're gonna shoot star points the number one thing you need to learn is the four hundred rule okay the four hundred rule this is crucial now you guys let's think about this with exposing we have three major exposure considerations right we have our ISO our aperture and our shutter speed all right I want to make this super simple because it really is astrophotography exposure wise is super simple okay what do you want your aperture or your f-stop to be for pretty much all astrophotography your ever gonna do as wide open as you can get it right so if you have an f28 lens you're shooting at to eight if you have an f-14 lens lucky you shoot at F one point four right if you have a five six lens shoot at five six wide open so that is across the board what you're gonna do so you can like literally put in your notes for all astrophotography use wide open apertures okay ISO what's the rule there what do we want it what do we want to consider when we think of is oh we don't want it we wanted a sense what as low as possible now is there anything stopping us from raising it up a lot no but you will get what noise you will be battling noise so with aya so my general rule of thumb is as low as possible that's kind of what I want to go with and that's true for pretty much all of photography right you always want to make sure your ISO is as low as it can be shutter speed though is the crucial one because here's the deal with star points if you do not have a tracking mount and even if you do have a tracking mount if your shutter speed is too slow what's gonna happen your stars are gonna trail right you're gonna get a little bit instead of having nice pointy round star you're gonna have slightly blurred stars and there's nothing sadder than coming home and on the back of your screen on your camera all your stars look perfectly pointy and then you put them on the computer and you zoom in and every one of them has a little trail it's super bummer time like you don't want to do that okay so with our shutter speed we've got to be careful all right now the 400 rule is here to help battle that okay what we want to do with the 400 rule and this requires some math and photographers in general aren't good at math I got my degree in physics so I am good at math I like math but some people aren't and that's okay so let's do it what we're gonna do is we're gonna take 400 and we're gonna divide it by the full frame equivalent focal length of your lens okay this is simple people okay if you have a full frame camera let's say you have a Canon 5d Mark 4 for example and you put a 70 to 200 millimeter lens on that thing okay and you have it zoomed to 200 what is your full frame equivalent focal length not trying to trick you it's 200 right there's no a full frame camera has no crop factor or nothing associated with it so you would have 200 as your focal length what if you took a 70 to 200 millimeter lens and you put it on a nikon crop sensor camera Nikon crop sensor cameras have a 1.5 times crop factor your 200 millimeter lens would act like a what a 300 millimeter lens so for the 400 rule computation you would use 300 for that computation okay so you take whatever your lens is acting like whatever whether that full frame or whatever happens to be whatever your lens is acting like you take 400 divided by that and you guys if it's a zoom lens it's wherever you have it currently zoomed to right if you have it zoomed to 70 you use 70 if you have to zoom to 300 you use 300 wherever it's zoomed to is what you're gonna use that for we'll go through some examples in a second but people always get a little baffled by that all right so let's try this all right what we're gonna get and this is key the result of this is the longest shutter speed you can use in seconds without seeing star trails without seeing any trailing in your photos now does anyone learn the 500 rule back in the day anyone remember the 500 rule okay before that there was the 600 rule it's kind of funny to keep lowering the number the reason is digital cameras keep getting better and better and the resolutions get higher and higher and back in the day in the film days the 500 rule was fine because they weren't high enough resolution photos to see the trailing but now that we have digital cameras when you do the foreign rule in a year or two or five we'll have the 300 rule right they'll just keep stepping it down to move with the wood thing so let's look at this all right now it's obviously better to go shorter than this if possible because that makes sense you get less blurring or no blurring for sure but let's look at an example all right so if we have a sixteen millimeter lens let's say we're doing a nice wide shot of you know some pretty landscape with the Milky Way if we take 400 and we divide it by 16 now you guys if I'm doing 400 divided by 16 what assumption am i instantly making here what type of camera am i using a full-frame camera right if I had a 16 millimeter lens on the Nikon camera that was a 1.5 crop factor it would look like a 124 right so I would be taking 400 divided by 24 instead of 400 divided by 16 okay so we take 400 by 16 if we're on a full-frame camera and that gives us 25 seconds okay so this needs to be crystal clear if I used in utter speed and again this is all about shutter speed this whole calculation if I used a shutter speed of 30 seconds with a sixteen millimeter lens what would my resulting image look like it'd have trails right what if I used 24 seconds I'm good no trails right so you need to be shorter than the result of this equation that's the whole goal now is it a perfect science no because it also depends where on the sky you're pointing remember I told you guys if you point toward the north of the South celestial poles there's less movement so you might be able to go to 3040 seconds if you're pointing close to the poles whereas if you're pointing right at the equator at the celestial equator it might be more like 20 seconds this is an average rule it's not perfect so don't blame me if it doesn't work for you sometimes it's not my fault I didn't come up with it yeah yeah yeah if was the sorry and he was signaling the mid same time yeah exactly you need the landscape to begin as well yeah yeah you guys if you have landscape in the frame you still got to stick with the 25 it's no matter what you anytime you have stars in the frame and you don't want the stars to blur you've got to stick with the 400 rule that's kind of a generic rule of it all right so what it means is what I just told you here are some examples all right this is up up Mauna Kea in Hawaii the big telescopes are up there and when I first saw this image I was like sweet a satellite went by a plane went by and then I realized this is actually super nerdy and I love this stuff again I got my degree in astrophysics which was awesome but this is actually one of the adaptive optics and lasers from one of the telescopes on the summit of the mountain pointing at the atmosphere in correcting for atmospheric disturbances for the big telescopes I saw this and I was like midway through getting my degree and I was like yes like this is so cool right we can also see that's the Andromeda galaxy that galaxy I was talking about earlier in the night the good first starting galaxy that little fuzzy blob that's your Andromeda galaxy it's pretty cool here's another one this is in Death Valley you could see stars are nice and pointy now notice you probably can't see super close but in the corners my stars aren't nice and pointy but they are in the center what's that tell us we think that tells us that's actually a problem with my lens not all lenses you guys know lenses get blurry ER as you move closer to the edges of the glass that's what's happening here that's something called coma and it's turning my little stars into what look like comments toward the edges of the frame and that's just there's nothing I can do about it that's just the fact of having a lens that does that there's no way around it couple more right so here we have more of a wide field shot but again our stars are nice and pointy there's a little bit of nebulosity right there there actually I think is the Andromeda galaxy again little tiny fuzzy blob down at the bottom that thing will be in all your photos like if you're pointing anywhere where it's there it's so bright that it'll be there it's pretty awesome this is a mosaic of three images this was like my first milky way shot that didn't even really get the Milky Way I was really happy about it so all right so you guys let's think about this let me review really quickly before we move on if you want to get some really pretty wide field Milky Way shot all you need to do is put your aperture wide open obviously okay set your shutter speed to whatever the 400 rule dictates whether that's 10 seconds 20 seconds 30 seconds whatever it happens to be and then adjust your ISO either up or down to correct the exposure now you guys here's the thing I wish I could magically tell you that ISO 800 is perfect all the time or ISO 6400 is perfect all the time it's really for me get out there and guess and check kind of situation if you think about if you have a 25 second exposure how long is it gonna take you to guess and check probably like five minutes right you just take a picture try ISO 200 up it to 400 take another picture five minutes later you have a proper exposure so there's no real right answer there just guess and check through your ISO s start low work high as soon as you get something that works keep it you're good to go alright and obviously if it's getting darker as you're shooting you might have to adjust throughout the night but that's really all there is to it Milky Way stuff simple alright so you ready yes yes because you are what do you mean not if you are following the 400 rule right not if your shutter speed is shorter than 400 divided by your focal length that's what that's fighting yeah so you guys if you if you don't want to buy a tracker and you don't want to have anything that's moving the tracking tracking the night sky which we'll talk about in a minute why you would want that but if you don't want to buy one of those if you follow the 400 rule your stars will be pointing that's the idea of that yes yeah I've tried it a little bit there's actually a really good program out for I don't remember what it's called there's one that just came out that's like supposedly like the current thing with Milky Way photography it only works on Mac and I don't remember quite what it's called I'll put it in the if you guys look check those of you in here check back in the video description I'll put it down on the YouTube video in the description those of you watching live I'll do it like tomorrow I'll find it and put it up there but there's a really awesome one and I've never tried that one but I tried the old ones in the past that didn't work very well Andy yes I was except for that last one yeah you guys the questions was do I stack multiple images together multiple Milky Way images together alright so now for the real stuff enough of that lame plain-jane night photography let's do the real good stuff okay so let's switch gears to real Astro photography now again real Astro photography as I call it different than other people but this is really coming in close on one object or another in the sky now you all what still is gonna hold true exposure wise when we start coming in closer on objects motion for sure we'll still have motion to play with right we'll still have our aperture we'll probably still want to be wide open right our ISO probably still as low as possible and what about the 400 rule probably the same thing right if we're still trying to all essentially we're doing now when we transition into real Astro photography is putting a longer lens on our camera right we're getting in a little bit closer all the other rules are gonna stay mostly the same so we'll look at that it gets kind of exciting it's really exciting all right so let's start by assuming you don't want to buy any additional equipment you're just gonna sit here and you'll be like nope I don't want to spend thousands it's it's a downward spiral people okay as soon as you buy one of those those trackers you really want that tracker and as soon as you buy that tracker you really want the $5,000 tracker and then like soon you've spent like 20 grand on astrophotography I have not spent that much but you could and your images honestly like I've seen and this is really cool I've seen people create images with a very basic 300 dollar tracker that are as good if not better than people using a $3,000 tracker it's all how much time how much experience you want to put into it's kind of like with photography it's not the camera that makes the photographer it's the photographer same deal but you will have a little bit of mount Envy once you start doing this for sure like it's it's gonna happen all right so let's take a look astrophotography without of tracking down all right so here's the thing what what we're gonna focus on shooting is not planets not the moon not the Sun because those things are kind of niche areas of Astro photography and my eyes I want to mostly focus on nebulas and galaxies and stars those are kind of my main things that I like to shoot and then I think most people start with well there's a cool name for these which is deep sky objects you guys will see that all over the internet if you start doing more of this nebulas galaxies and like globular clusters like little star constellations are in general referred to as deep sky objects and the cool thing is they're big that are really big so if you have a 70 to 200 millimeter lens which is what I use for a lot of what I do you can get really good results even at 70 millimeters you can get really cool Astro photos so super doable but you've got to pick the largest ones there are obviously lots of deep sky objects that are super tiny and you need like a 2000 millimeter telescope to tackle those we can't do that without specialized equipment so focusing on the biggest ones is very important all right we'll talk about that with a long lens in a tripod you can totally do it obviously you have to have a tripod something to stabilize yourself but that's about it you can do some really cool stuff all right now what we do is this and this is where things get really cool what you need to do to take a really good Astro photo is you need to shoot the object that you're interested in for a very long time because essentially what's happening is if you guys think about it if you've got your sky your background sky say you know most background skies and Astro photos are black or dark grey right you've got the background sky the object that you're interested in is almost as dark as the sky like very very close to the same brightness of this guy and I'm talking more about galaxies and nebulae now obviously stars are much brighter than the sky but most things we're shooting are very dim against the sky and the thing is with one picture if you were to take like one two second photo of that area of the sky two seconds is not enough time for many more photons from the object you're interested in light from the object that you're interested in to hit the sensor then the light from the sky from just the background sky hit your sensor you really have to shoot for longer durations to make the difference between the background sky and the object you're interested in start to separate a little bit otherwise you're just counting the sky and the object is the same thing so the longer we can get our shutter speed the more that background is gonna pull away from the object we're interested does that make sense you guys okay now here's the thing if we use the 400 rule with a 70 to 200 millimeter lens and let's say we're on a full-frame camera what do we get if we take it say we have a 200 millimeter lens and we use the 400 rule what's the longest shutter speed we could use two seconds is that a lot of time no that's not a lot of time at all and in two seconds if you think about it you take a picture of what you are told by smart people is this like beautiful spiral galaxy and you take a picture of it I just drew a potato on the board but that's a galaxy all right look got a spiral alright cool you're shooting your little spiral galaxy you know like those images that I showed at the beginning right if you shoot this for two seconds right let's say that like ten little units of light hit your sensor right here during those two seconds and let's say that only 11 hit your sensor from here so that's only one unit of light brighter than the background sky well think about it if you go down to one second that's only five and 5.5 you guys see how it's even closer together the difference between the object we want and the sky is even less so what you can start to see is as you lengthen your exposure time the difference like I was saying the difference between what you want and the background sky increases and that's what we're going for so if we are limited to a two-second exposure what can we do how do we get around this we shoot a ton of these photos okay so let's think about that if we keep shooting two-second exposure after two seconds of exposure after two-second exposure of the same object in the sky again and again and again and again what's going to start happening those objects are going to start to separate apart we're gonna start to see differences between the galaxies that we're interested in and the background sky because that's the way this works shooting shot after shot after shot after shot now how many is is enough this is always the question people asked me I love this okay you guys what this is called is integrating photos it's called image integration and it's something that scientists use it's something that astrophotographers use what we like to talk about in Astro photography is something called integration time which is if you took all of the exposures that you put into an image and you add it up the amount of time taken in every single exposure what's the total amount of time you shot that object for right so let's say you shot four 30-second exposures of an object and you put them all together in Photoshop what would the integration time be of that two minutes you'd call that a two minute integration time okay give you a little perspective many of the best Astro photos are over a hundred hours of integration time okay over a hundred hours of integration time so if you think about that if we have a hundred hours there's 60 minutes in an hour right that's 6,000 right no yes 6000 minutes of integration time you multiply that by 60 to get how many seconds that is that's a lot of time okay now that's for many of the dimmer objects that you're gonna be doing that for for you guys when you're shooting a bright object like the Andromeda galaxy if you could get 30 40 50 minutes of integration time that'd be awesome if you can get ten minutes of innovation time that'd be awesome there's no golden rule essentially you want to get as much as you can stand getting that's kind of the the idea okay so let me give you an example let's say that you want to start by shooting the Andromeda galaxy that's a great bet Andromeda is up in this part of the world all night every night throughout the entire year it's always above the horizon it's circumpolar so it's always available to shoot it's a great bright object and I would say if you guys were going to go out and try to start you would want to maybe get ten minutes of in drama at a time ten minutes of integration time okay so let's say that that's our goal we want to get 10 minutes of time let me write that on the board all right so we're going for 10 minutes of integration time and let's say that we can use one-second exposures okay let's say we only have one second exposures because we're gonna use a 400 millimeter lens to shoot Andromeda okay so we have one second exposures how many pictures do we need to take 600 exactly we take 600 images so you guys I love this stuff all right so that literally means you're out there on your tripod you point in Andromeda you set your shutter speed to one second what do you set your aperture to wide open what do you set your ISO to whatever it needs to be we're gonna talk about exposing in a little bit I'll kind of give you guys some guidelines on where to put it where to get that exposure set to but let's say we set our ISO magically and you set your shutter speed to one second you're gonna go click click and preferably use a cable release so you're not bouncing your camera each time you push it each time you push the button click click click click click what's gonna happen as you're doing that Andromeda is gonna move out of the frame right so every so often you're going to look through the viewfinder be like oh alright recenter it loosen the tripod move it over click click click click click click click click click for like another you know five minutes look back reposition click click click again and again and again until you've taken what 600 frames till you've gotten enough of the images to make it work does that make sense you guys at its core alright questions so far well if they're one second long 600 seconds but you got to give a little bit of a break so you know 20 minutes you're out there for 20 minutes not not a crazy amount of time ok but is it particularly enjoyable no depends if you like cold nights or you know being out in the stars I personally think it's kind of relaxing to fire shot after shot after shot but you guys that's what we're doing we're essentially taking a 10 minute exposure made up of little one-second chunks does that make sense ok cool now let me give you before I forget one other really good target to start with ok Andromeda galaxy is one thing the second thing would be the Orion Nebula most people know the Orion constellation it's you know Orion's belt you see the three little belt stars in Orion's dagger down on his belt which Orion is coming up at the perfect time this time of year it's rising right as the Sun sets its up perfectly right on Orion's dagger there are a bunch of little nebulous there's like a whole cluster of nebulas and if you just point your camera up there I promise it's very cool you point your camera up there and you take like a two-second exposure or whatever the 400 rule says of that little area you'll be blown away with how many cool nebulas you'll see in that area that's another great place to start because it's on the dagger which right next to the belt it's very easy to find that target without any sort of extra aid ok so we're integrating our exposures through time alright this is only possible for the brighter ones and this is the bummer of it I showed you guys that shot of the Whirlpool Galaxy earlier tonight that really pretty spiral galaxy that galaxy is so dim that during a two-second exposure you would basically not see it it would just be the exact same brightness as the background sky so even if you shot like 10 20 30 thousand one-second exposures it's not bright enough to separate at all even when you add all of those up so there's limits yes obviously it's not gonna work for even the dimmest objects or astronomers would not buy trackers there'd be no reason for it okay so it'll only work for the brighter ones but you guys if you own a 200 millimeter lens or even a 70 millimeter lens and a camera and you have a tripod go try this it's awesome like so many people see this and I see them sitting in here nodding like yeah that's cool then I ask him a week later did you try it go try it it's awesome like it's gonna work for you especially in the winter when it gets dark at like 5 you have no excuse it's totally worth it like go go try these things all right now here's a big thing you have to know the sky okay you guys I have an unfortunate story for you people who spend more money on mounts on big tracking amounts you get something called go-to when you spend a lot of money on a mount and what that means is I can basically in my at my home my home telescope mount I can type in go to the Andromeda galaxy and the telescope goes and like points directly at it for me I don't have to like kind of look through it and look down the lens and do all these crazy things to do that so if you don't have a tracker you have to know the sky and that's why I think Andromeda and Orion are so simple because most people can find them with just the naked eye it's a pretty easy target to find okay yeah ah that's a great question something you can fit like yeah you guys a good a good memory card thanks for feeding yeah I got to repeat the questions a good size memory card to start off with you for getting master photography something you can get what a thousand images on something like that you really want to be able to not worry about it because you guys just saw you might need 600 images in the night of one object if you want to do multiple objects that's 600 of each so enough space for a lot of photos I also shoot raw for everything because I never know whether I want it you get a lot of Astro photos really fast to give you guys a little perspective the average Astro photo that I shoot that's a final processed image is around about a hundred gigabytes of size including all the processing files all the extra files that go into it a hundred gigabytes 200 gigabytes something like that so if you buy a 1 terabyte hard drive that's gonna fit between 5 and 10 finished Astro photos on it you fill space fast it's just the way of it but hard drives are cheap these days you get a 1 terabyte out there for like 50 bucks now can't complain about that right they're cheap all right so let's talk a little bit about the steps involved with doing this and how we're gonna go through the steps okay so first thing is you need to plan this out and this is true whether you have a mount or don't have a mount whatever happens to be you need to make a plan because I've gone out so many nights and I've been like I'm gonna do some Astro photography I get mine out and hike it outside and I'm like I plan it down I'm like well there's a sky what do I shoot right you just don't you don't know so you definitely need a plan and we'll talk about that you also need to get good at finding the target in the field how do we actually find what we're looking for there's some little tricks I'll show you guys in a little bit and we'll go through each of these in detail after I go through all of them kind of broadly focusing this is a big one who's taking a blurry Astro photo oh yeah like good stuff I'm sure people watching too have taken a blurry Astro photo how do you focus at night it's dark right auto focus usually doesn't work it's pretty hard so we'll talk about some tricks for that exposing all right we know what our shutter speed is we know what our aperture is but I have some tricks for you guys to set your ISO accurately which is nice now this is important this is getting into something that if you guys want to start off and Astro photography and you want to take it a little bit further I'm putting some stuff right here that we're not going to talk about tonight but I urge you if this is something you want to do to look at this on your own because it's very important when we are shooting astrophotographers like to talk about shooting two different types of images the first are called lights and you guys a light frame a light photo as it's called is what you'd think it's a photo of the object you're trying to shoot that's simple so you could just think of this instead of saying lights as pictures of the object simple there are also these things called calibration frames and what calibration frames are they're not photos of your object there are actually photos of either the noise in your photo or the vignette in your images or what's called the bias voltage on your sensor these guys can be used to improve your light frames you can use your calibration frames to improve the final result of your photograph and again it's a little bit beyond what I want to chat about tonight in this talk but if you guys are interested definitely do a little google search for darks flats and biases because they are very helpful if you're going to go further down the line of astrophotography yes I leave it off because I like to do darks which are kind of your own version of long exposure noise reduction yeah anytime you you're dealing with long exposure noise reduction it's not for me because you basically you guys if you think about it with long exposure noise reduction what are you missing out on if every shot you take it shoots another frame to remove the noise sure you get less noise but what what are you missing not detail but double your basically have to be outside for twice as long right it's taking up two times the amount of time to shoot the same number of photos so if you guys do some looking darks are a way to do the same thing long exposure noise reduction is doing without having to do it when you're shooting the sky you can do it on another night or another day or something like that so that's something to look at for sure you stack right when you get home you've taken all your frames you stack them together to turn them into one final photo and then lastly you do your editing and your final processing all right so let's break these down let's talk about planning and what's involved with the planning phase of Astro photography all right here's some software programs that I would recommend you guys look at okay it's really nice when you're planning a shoot to be able to open up a planetarium program on your computer and look around at the sky at what its gonna look like the night that you're planning on shooting so if you're on Mac or Windows the one I would recommend is Stellarium it's awesome it's free it works on both platforms it even works on Linux it's a great program and what you can do is download Stellarium and tell Stellarium hey I live in Missoula Montana or wherever you happen to live and I'm going out tonight so I want to see what the Stars will look like tonight at eight o'clock and you type that into Stellarium and it shows you everything that's going to be looking at in Missoula at eight o'clock tonight it's very very cool and you can even go in and tell it like I only want to see the brightest objects or I only want to see the dimmest objects you can do all this kind of customization to it for those of you guys watching live it's actually there's a link to stellarium down in the video description so the view for you as you guys in here if you click on this video once you guys leave here tonight there's a link down there you can click on it and get right to Stellarium sky x is another one it costs I think like three or four hundred dollars but it has a lot more stars than Stellarium does so if you're interested in like getting there really best and having all of the objects that's what I would go with and Voyager is another one that has more objects as well so stellarium is really what I would recommend and you guys basically what I would do is just look around and look for one of these suitable objects so let's talk about what we're looking for I've already given you two Andromeda and the Orion Nebula but there's some other things I can help with what you want to do is stick to what's called the Messier or the NGC catalog now those sounds super fancy and nerdy and they are but basically those are just names of catalogues of objects so the Messier catalog named after the astronomer he basically went around and categorized or named a bunch of objects in the sky and he called them the Messier objects they happen to be very bright and usually easy to photograph which is awesome so if you find a Messier object they always start with M Capital m like M 31 or m1 or m2 if you see an object like that there's a good bet that you with a DSLR would be able to capture an image of it okay so Messier is good and then ng see those are that's another good set of objects that you can shoot there are some much dimmer ones in the NGC catalogs you gotta be a little careful there alright now this gets confusing you want to look at the objects magnitude and all programs that our planetarium programs will give you the magnitude of the object magnitudes are inversed so the lower the magnitude the brighter the object is so you want magnitudes of lower than six so six five really you won't find anything lower than that so six or five for what you guys are gonna be looking at okay and that means that you get brighter objects like I think the magnitude of the fold of the Sun at noon is like negative 31 or something right it's like incredibly bright we're looking at you know sixes fives maybe a seven if you're really daring and you want to be out there for three hours but you get the idea all right larger objects are great so this is where you can start to see and you guys this all sounds kind of foreign when you get into Stellarium or sky acts or Voyager all of these things are laid out for you it explains all this stuff it tells you what it all is you want to find something that has one degree of angular size now what that means is if you all think about it if you've got the sky and let's say you're standing in like the Salt Flats so the horizon is perfectly straight in all directions right or maybe like the North Pole so you've got like flat ice in all directions no mountains how many degrees from this side of them you know the other side of me 180 right and if I turn this way 180 that way so one degree of angular size means that it takes up one square degree chunk on the sky so one 180th in this direction and one 180th in this direction a nice big chunk of sky anything that size or bigger is gonna be well-suited for a 70 to 200 millimeter lens or something that we all not all but a lot of us commonly own seventeen to 300 something like that so nice big objects a little easier alright objects are also high in the sky are usually preferred why is that atmosphere okay you guys we talked about the very beginning shooting planetary astronomy or astrophysics for the higher something is the less atmosphere you have to shoot through to shoot it so when you're trying to shoot the Orion Nebula and I told you guys it's rising as soon as the Sun sets be smart to wait an hour or two til it's gotten kind of high in the sky so you're not shooting it right on the horizon because excuse me you shoot through much less atmosphere that way and that's a good thing all right now let's move one in the next step finding the target in the field okay astronomers I had a professor in in college who said that a lot of astronomy is pattern recognition that's what you're trying to do is recognize patterns what I like to do if I'm trying to find something pretty dim is in Stellarium you can print a little star chart of the stars around the object you're looking for now what you want to do is print out a piece of paper and yes you actually want to print it I like I always that people ask me like what about my smartphone app don't look at a screen of a smartphone when you're trying to find a dim object it doesn't work outside right you like looking at this bright screen look up you like it doesn't work so print out a piece of paper that has the bright stars around the object you're looking for and then what I like to do is look up at the sky and try to find where that star pattern lies where those stars are and come you got to rotate the piece of paper sometimes to find a lineup but find something and then what I do is I point my camera that direction and I put my camera on live view right the little live view mode where it should the screen displays what the lens is seeing reason being is when you're looking through the viewfinder of the camera things are really dim and hard to see but if you use the live view screen on the back it's much brighter much easier and you can see the dim stars a lot a lot easier so that helps you get centered and get it get it online but printing off a star chart super important and trying to find those patterns okay if you have a zoom lens also zoom out as much as you can when you put it on live view because then you can see as many stars around the object is possible getting things centered is quite hard sometimes all right with live view you guys this is important your live view settings how bright your live view preview is is determinant entirely on what your current camera settings are so when I switch over to live view I always put it on my highest ISO my slowest shutter speed and a wide open aperture now am I gonna shoot it like this no I'm just doing this for framing the image I'm just getting that live view picture as bright as possible for framing and getting everything aligned the way I want it to be all right use an app use a star chart find a recognizable pattern in the vicinity of your target and line things up all right I like to look down the barrel of the glens can't like kind of like put my eye a lot I do a lot of like this get my eye right to the side of the lens so I can look down the length of the lens try to get things aligned okay last this is what the pros do they use a finder scope now finder scopes look like a little mini telescope that you put on your telescope usually a little small telescope attached to your big telescope DSLR world you can get one of these so an actual like red dot sight from like a rifle or a handgun like an actual gun sight they make mounts that let you mount those to the hotshoe of your camera now what that does you guys is this projects a little red dot onto the center of that little window that you look through and you can align this thing so that whatever the little red dot is on that's where your lens is pointing and that makes it really easy to align things perfectly these can be had for like 40 50 bucks highly recommended if you're going to do a lot of this it really helps you get things aligned quickly pretty cool little trick a red dot sight or a red dot finder a lot of different names for them and if you go on like B and H's website or there's a lot of websites that sell them but B and H would happen for sure they'll have little mounts that let you take your hot shoe and you slide a little mountain your hot shoe and then so you put a red dot finder on that little mount makes it super easy yeah call it a red dot finder all right focusing this is hard here's an example of a blurry photo isn't that pretty you guys hey but guess what are my stars round I used the 400 rule perfectly does it matter no right everything's super blurry this unfortunately looked great on the back of my camera I was like oh man I got that focus nailed and then I got home I was like what is that that's just terrible all right you got to make sure your focus is set all right so let's talk a little bit about that the nice thing is when I'm focusing I actually used the same live view settings as when I was framing the image I use the same exact live view settings meaning the live view preview is as bright as possible in the screen so you want essentially when you're focusing you want to use live view live he was going to help you out a lot all right manual focus I have not found a camera yet today that can adequately and consistently focus on a star it just doesn't work it's very hard for the focus to do that there are telescopes that do it but cameras just aren't cut out for that so you want to make sure you're on manual focus all right turn that focus ring and what you're looking for is there's gonna be a certain point in your focusing where the stars look small and that's what you want to go for when you're in Live View the stars and you'll turn the ring those of you who've done this you'll know what I'm talking about you'll turn that focus ring and the stars will get be big and fuzzy and they'll get smaller and then as you go past focus they get bigger again and you want to do that a few times smaller bigger smaller bigger and work your way until you get the smallest possible star now I need to be honest with you guys one of the big reasons people buy telescopes is because telescopes have really nice focusers attached to them it's one of the big advantages of a telescope over a camera lens camera lenses their focus is very coarse it's very rough adjustment telescopes have very fine tuning focus so this is a little bit frustrating you're gonna go back and forth a lot of times the way to know get it as close as you can and then make sure on live view you hit the zoom in button and you can actually digitally zoom into that preview on the back of your camera and make sure that that star is as small as possible so don't make sure you're utilizing that also take a test shot if you need to to take a test picture and check it out see what it looks like all right now gaffers tape gaffers tape is awesome it's a photographer's best friend it's like duct tape but it doesn't leave residue and it's black and it's awesome it's non reflective every gaffer uses it it's amazing I like to bring gaffers tape with me out in the field and as soon as I've got my focus where I want it I take a little piece of gaffers tape and I taped down my focus ring so I can't tell you how many times I get everything set it's all focused and I point at my object and I mean to hit the zooming ring and I hit the focus ring and I lose my focus and I got to do it all over again so I really like to gas tape down that focus ring so it doesn't move super crucial now temperature compensation what do you think that means what our lens is made of usually glass yeah what the the material that the outside is is usually metal right metal or plastic metal for a nicer lens what happens to metal is it heats and cools it expands and contracts a little bit there's a little bit of expansion or contraction okay I'm not kidding you during the course of a night if you take your lens out from a hot house and you put it out in a cold winter night in Montana if you focus when that lens is warm is room temperature and you get your focus lock down as that lens starts to cool down to the ambient temperature outside in the world you will be pulled out of focus it will it will mess with your focus so make sure you're checking this routinely every maybe 10 20 30 frames get on live view check again make sure your focus is perfect it's gonna be a constantly checked process because that temperature will do it in fact really really nice telescopes are made out of carbon fiber because carbon fiber does not change size as much with temperature so you don't have to do this see thanks spend three grand on the telescope and you don't have to adjust your focus midway through the night look at that all right you want to find a bright star when you do this brightest star the better honestly stars are all the same distance away as far as the cameras concerned so if you focus on one star and you shoot a completely different star it doesn't matter the focus is going to be the same regardless of where you point all right exposing okay I say it's all about that ISO why because we know what our aperture is gonna be and we know what our shutter speed is gonna be our shutter speeds gonna be 400 rule our aperture is gonna be wide open so really our ISO is all we have to go off of all right so we know these two things and I have another example in here for shutter speed where I say that if we have a 200 millimeter lens 400 rule divided by 200 is 2 seconds simple all right that's review aperture we know we're wide open so let's talk about ISO okay what you're looking for you guys what's the majority of the photo going to be in the image what's the medjool what's gonna be the most of what's in your picture black sky right dark sky what do we want to make sure we don't do what do you think we don't want to block up the sky we don't want the sky to go pure black because if the sky goes pure black a lot of photographers call it clipping you clip the blacks in the photo meaning black without detail if you do that you're losing information and that's not a good thing so what you want to do is you want to adjust your ISO until your histogram look something like this you guys see that massive spike what do you think that is that's your back sky that's your background sky and you want to make sure that your histogram and that's something to look at when you're shooting is for sure have your histogram up want to make sure that your histogram is not touching the left-hand side that's the crucial part because if that histogram is slammed up against the left-hand side that means you're losing information in your blacks means essentially you're throwing away pixels that are important to you okay so what I do I the old highly advanced guessin Scheck technique where I literally started 800 I take a picture I look at the histogram if it's touching the left I go to 1600 and I keep increasing that until my histogram looks something like that okay pretty simple and I walk through it here goal is to get the majority the information in the mid-tones in the shadows all right ISO is gonna completely depend on two things light pollution and moon phase this is important okay why why does it depend on light let's talk about light pollution what's light pollution gonna do for us or against us you guys think yeah it's gonna definitely give your sky a color cast right if you look up in the sky in missoula at the MIT in the middle of the night the sky looks orange it just dust right what else is it gonna do for you it's gonna brighten the sky right it's gonna make everything brighter and that is gonna really hurt you when you're trying to get that really dim object to be pulled away from the dark background because if you make the background brighter the contrast between those two things goes way way down so you guys if you're gonna do real Astro photography especially if you're not gonna buy a mount or something like that getting to a really dark sky is really important if you can drive you know 15 20 30 miles outside of Missoula or wherever you happen to live do that because it really you're gonna be fighting a battle trying to do it here in like downtown Missoula it's not gonna work very well what about moon phase same thing right same thing the fuller the moon the more sky brightness there is I'm gonna be honest with you guys if you're not gonna buy a tracking mount and you're just gonna do this with your the gear you have which you should definitely try don't do it on a full moon night in fact I would really only do it on a new moon or one or two days before or after the new one I think the new moon was like three or four days ago so right now is what is it today mmm awesome all right the new moons today go out tonight get some shots I think it's cloudy but whatever just imagine the clouds not feeling there go away you know if you guys are watching live those of you who are watching live go shoot tonight if it's clear like it's a great it's a great time to do it the the new moon is perfect because there's none of that light pollution and you all even Missoula is a mid-sized town even ten miles outside of town the amount of light pollution goes way way way down compared to in town so you don't have to go very far just find yourself some national forest land and go out there and you know pull off the side of the road and spend an hour shooting and you'll be surprised what you get it's pretty pretty cool all right but that definitely plays a part in what your exposure will be all right more light pollution equals lower ISO obviously because there's more available light all right now I should mention this there are really cool filters that smarter people than I have made to cut down on light pollution here's the cool thing and I'm gonna go into this for like a minute because it's super nerdy and it's my duty to nerd out with you guys even if you're not gonna do it with me I'm gonna tell you anyway all right lights city lights emit light in very specific wavelengths very specific colors like when you look up at the sky someone said things look very orange in Missoula that's because the streetlights Missoula uses are very orange in Hawaii they use special street lights because the telescope's are up there that look very yellow they don't interfere as much with what the telescopes are doing up there it's pretty cool long story short those lights are very consistent around the world a lot of lights use the same colors all city lights and a lot of students are the same colors so what companies do is they build these little filters that you screw on either the front of your lens or the very front of your mirror right in front of your mirror before you put the lens on they're called a clip-in filter and what they do is they allow all wavelengths of light to pass through that filter except for the common wavelengths that city lights emit in so essentially as far as your camera is concerned it's in a beautiful dark sky location even though you can see all this light pollution the camera can't see it and that helps a lot if you're always shooting in missoula or something like that or a big city so those are pretty cool they're like three or four hundred dollars but they're cool they're definitely investment all right shooting shooting lights you guys this is simple we've gone through this I just want to do it again real quick some little settings I would put my mirror if you have a DSLR camera on Mir lock-up mode what that means is before each frame we all know in our DSLR is we have a little mirror that flops up before each picture is taken like the mir flops up and then the shutter opens and closes and that takes the photo if you put it on mir lock-up mode when you click the button the mir locks up about a second before the shutter opens and closes and what that does for you is it ensures there's less camera shake so if your camera has the option I would put it on Mir lock up if you have a mirrorless camera one of the newer Milla's cameras you don't need to worry about that because there is no mirror it's literally called a mirrorless camera alright so there's no reason to do that cable release or self timer for sure I really vote cable release because waiting for a 10 second self timer every time you want to take one of six hundred photos not fun okay can't really see you just go like Bam Bam Bam do them quick Center the object shoot a series of images reposition and repeat and that's literally what you're gonna do Center shoot reposition center shoot reposition now you're gonna start to learn that the object will always move in one certain direction so instead of centering it you could intentionally off-center it opposite of the direction it's gonna move so you have a longer time before you have to reposition it you can start to do that but that's really what you're doing resetting shooting repeating okay aim for around 30 to 60 minutes of images I just told you guys 10 minutes earlier that's a great benchmark for something like Andromeda or the Orion Nebula but as you start to get to dimmer and dimmer objects more time the better I will shout out to one of our past summer intensive and professional intensive students I had a guy a couple years ago who wanted to do Astro photography he took something like 1200 images of this one object and he was out there shooting every single frame and then when he got to aligning them which we'll talk about in a minute he literally took the time to click the same star in all 1200 photos and that's something that you have to go through and his image at the end was really pretty it was worth the effort but like you if this stuff takes time it definitely does so you got to be ready to do that alright integration all right when you're all done shooting you'll be doing that integration and you'll add up all of those different exposures and put them into one alright now shooting calibration frames this is all I'm gonna talk about this okay calibration frames will have a huge impact on your resulting images and you remember that's those things called darks flats and biases that this is all you're gonna get on those read about them if you want to basically what they are is you're shooting images of nothing as an example taking a dark frame what you do is you put your lens cap on and you take a picture of your lens cap super-exciting a flat frame you actually put a t-shirt over your lens and take a picture of a t-shirt like there's these weird things okay like I said there's three tarps darks flats and bias all right then we stack we put these together okay now stacking is done in software okay stacking is done in software there are some programs I would recommend for those of you guys in here if you watch this video afterward there is links to all these software programs down in the description of the video for those you guys watching live you can do it right now click on that link in the description and there's links to all this stuff the first program I would recommend for all of you guys because it's free is deep sky stacker now this program is officially only for PC people it doesn't work on Mac but there is this German company I don't know if it's a company or a dude a lot of things in like astronomy are just like one man or one woman operations like that's the way they do it I don't know how legit or how unleash it this company is or person is but there is a person in Germany who has ported deep sky stacker over to Mac and there's links to both the PC version and the slightly ghetto maybe German version that works on Mac in the description of the video so it's a great program it works it's free and I have had students use the Mac version with great success so I have had people use it I just haven't done it personally okay another one's called nebulosity this one's made by a guy named Craig stark he's an awesome like I think he's a professor he's like a neuroscientist or something but his side hobby is astronomy and he makes a great program that does stacking his program cost about 80 dollars though so you're paying a little bit of a premium but you get Mac and PC use officially and it does a better job than deep-sky stacker so that's cool the third one is picks insight picks insight is about 300 dollars and it's basically Photoshop for astrophotographers it's got everything it does everything automated it's it's beautiful it like brought a tear to my eye the first time I use it it's amazing it's a fantastic program but you're spending a premium for that so that's really only an investment if you want to do this long term obviously but those are three really solid programs to do this okay you stack it and then you edit it and I should say also nebulosity and picks insight also do editing they're not just stackers they'll also do some editing aspects as well but if you guys have Photoshop or even Lightroom it can do some editing for you too so no worries there all right let's look at some examples that right there is the Orion Nebula that was shot with about ten minutes of integration time with a DSLR without a tracking mount in my backyard alright so those of you who say you can't do Astro photography proof you all can do Astro photography right that's about a 200 millimeter lens and now is it perfect you guys if you look closely there's a lot of noise in here right and if I was to shoot this for longer than 10 minutes go 20 30 40 50 minutes that noise would clear away and everything would look a lot better but for a start heck we're pretty good here's the Andromeda galaxy and again that's about ten minutes alright and we're just starting to see you guys see that spiral arm right there the other spiral arm right there you can start to see that spiral detail and again with more time and more time and time that will start to become even clearer okay so definitely definitely doable questions with that that's the process of taking an Astro photo if you don't want to buy any gear okay any questions alright what I want to transition to for the next maybe 10 15 minutes and then we'll then we'll wrap it up is what what you want to do if you do want to buy a little bit of equipment and and again this can be as little or as much as you want to spend but I recommend for most people who want to do this setting a budget of around $1,000 for everything that you want to get is a pretty good starting place you can do it for less for sure but that's a pretty safe bet that would get you something that you would really be happy with for quite a while so let's talk about some of the options alright first of all we have telescopes and mounts and those are kind of the two things people consider buying when they are thinking about doing this either a tracker or a new telescope which one do you think's more important telescope er mount mount I think the mounts way more important because if you guys think about it what is a 200 millimeter lens it's a telescope right 200 millimeter lens is essentially telescope what is a mount that you have in your bag you don't have one in your bag right like a mount is something that a lot most people just don't own so I would definitely spend the time on the mount now let me show you guys what a mount looks like so this guy is called the IAP Tron is the brand and it's called the sky tracker it's called the IAP Tron sky tracker now what it is it's very simple it's just a little motor and again let me ask you guys how often does the stars do the stars make one full rotation around sky 24 hours okay well there's a little motor in here that turns a gear and that motor is programmed to rotate the gear around how often do you think once every 24 hours so what happens is I'm going to loosen this little this little lock here but what happens is and this obviously happens in a much slower pace than what I'm about to do but the motor turns this axis of the mountain just like this alright I'm running and let me do it this way this will be easier it turns this axis of the mountain once every 24 hours it rotates the camera around like that okay now here's the key part if you guys think about it if you were standing on the equator of the earth and you looked due east or due west alright right at sunset so you're standing on the equator you look due east or due west and you watch a star what does that star gonna do throughout the night you watch it for the whole night until the Sun rises it's gonna go up straight over your head and set directly behind you you guys with me so far right because we're on the equator due east we pick a star okay think about this what we do with this little mount is do you guys see how there's a little scope over here on the side there's a little scope this is actually its own little mini telescope alright I can see all you guys alright little mini telescope what this is for is this is key to a mount and you guys the type of mount that this is and the type of mount you would want to buy if you bought one is what's called a German equatorial mount a German equatorial mount and again there's links to all this stuff down in the description of the video but a German equatorial mount is a mount that is calibrated to move with the Stars so let me show you how this works what you do when you're trying to set this up is you need to find the North Star or the Southern Cross you need to find the North or South celestial Pole and what I do let's say that it's right up there magically it just happened to be where I wanted it to be and I look through this little scope and in that scope you guys if you buy one of these you'll see it there's a little crosshair now what you do is you actually align that crosshair with either the North Star or the Southern Cross now there's a little app you can get that shows you where to put it specifically because I told you guys really the North Star is not perfectly on the North celestial Pole but you put it where the app tells you to put it and what that means is that this mount is now perfectly aligned with the pole of the earth does that make sense you all okay now here's the cool part it makes one rotation every every 24 hours right and if we think about it if the north pole is that direction north celestial pole I should be careful where is the celestial equator from this position if this is this way a flat plane out in all directions like this right well check this out look at what axis this rotates on the exact axis of the celestial equator so what this means is once the Mount has been aligned to the pole I can take this little knob on my head and you guys this is just a normal tripod head the way that this works is this mount it goes right on your tripod and you take your normal tripod head off of your tripod and you put it on the mount so all that's needed here is just this little red box and if you have a tripod and you have a head you can make this little combination here now what this does is you can take your camera and you can point it at any star in the sky so let's like loosen it let's say that we want to point like right there I really like that star that's actually kind of pole air so let's point it right there lock everything down so we choose that we're gonna shoot this direction okay now normally we would have to see that this is a fifth of 50 millimeter lens do the four hundred rule calculation figure out what our longest shutter speed is but instead we turn this little guy on you flip a switch and what's happening in the background so slowly is that this camera is tracking with that object and if you look through this viewfinder after an hour of tracking with the object guess what's still in your frame the object so whenever we're just talking about how shooting without a tracker you've got a shoot shoot shoot reposition shoot shoot shoot reposition people tracking mount you never have to reposition it keeps the object in the center does that make sense you guys okay and there's no need to realign them out I can just take the camera pointed at another star all right that kind of would be the ground but imagine that there was a star down there and the tracker is still going and it tracks it through the night all the way up as it rises and it sets and that's really all there is to it there are amazing little devices it's just a simple motor that rotates once every 24 hours that's what it's doing now people always ask me well actually I'm gonna ask you guys instead what does this do for us obviously it eliminates the need to reposition things but what's the big advantage we're gaining here what's the big advantage reducing blur true but what does that allow us to do we can use a longer shutter speed right instead of being chained to the 400 rule now we can start breaking that 400 rule and using longer and longer and longer shutter speeds because in the duration of the exposure this will track with it now I just told you guys that this cost 300 dollars and that costs $700 and then you can get one for four or five thousand dollars why what do you think those are letting you do a nicer and nicer mount yeah exactly they have greater precision they have greater tracking precision so I happen to know that this camera with maybe a 70 to 200 millimeter lens that we've been using for this whole time without a tracker a 70 to 200 is what maybe two seconds exposure that's maximum time I know that with this tracker I can get about 30 to 60 seconds of exposure time okay so instead of two seconds we're talking almost 30 seconds to a minute of total exposure time without any sort of trailing because this is tracking with it but you all there's no surefire thing I can't tell you that if you buy a sky tracker it's gonna be 30 seconds or a minute it depends on your specific sky tracker how well it's machined it could be 45 seconds it could be 30 could be two minutes there's a lot of variables in there does that make sense you all all right you're buying accuracy you're buying precision you're buying gear ratios like was said there all right questions with this so far okay I want to take it up one notch sky trackers are great and I'll be honest with you guys I I don't travel anywhere without my sky tracker like I bring that thing with me wherever I go but this guy let me bring it in frame here for everyone on the stream not bonk into anything this is one step up and this is called the sky guide err so instead of the sky tracker it's the sky guide err now this little guy does not come with it it's really just this red thing but what immediately do you notice here it's got a weight down at the bottom a counterweight okay so check this out if I loosen this guy this is called a clutch this holds the thing still and I position this guy right here and I let go it's loose right now and it stays put I can position this wherever I want to position it and it stays and so what this allows you to do because it has a counterweight shaft is to use a much heavier camera and lens combination I could use this on the sky tracker but it's not nearly as much fun to use because it's like heavy it's leaning over to one side with this guy I can very precisely point at anything I'm looking to shoot and then once I've pointed out it I can lock down my clutch knobs flip the switch and it does the exact same tracking job okay so it's doing the same thing it just gives me greater precision this can go between four and five minutes with a 70 to 200 millimeter lens okay and then I talked about my other telescope mount at home it can go indefinitely it's so precise that I can just shoot for hours if I wanted to but there's obviously a limit why couldn't I take a four hour exposure one for our shot overexposed yeah there's just too much light in the sky right there's gonna be a point where you're at ISO 100 right and your aperture is that like f56 and you're still bright white because you've been shooting for four hours like there's a limit to what you can do but the nicer the mount the more tracking sensitivity you get okay so these are super great neither of them though has that go-to functionality that I was talking about where you can program in go to the Andromeda galaxy and it just goes earned points there that you need to spend like a thousand dollars two thousand dollars to get that ability but honestly these are kind of fun because they make you learn the sky like you have to know the sky a little bit you have to know star patterns and constellations and that kind of is a fun challenge it's a hobby in itself so that's what these are there's any questions with that so far yes so they both actually have internal lithium batteries so they will run for about 12 hours on those batteries but they both have USB charge ports so I actually have a little USB power bank that I strapped to my tripod and I use this to power my camera and my tracker during long shooting sessions because I don't like my camera running out either so that's totally a doable thing anything that charges with USB you can just get a little USB power bank for like 30 bucks and that that will give you a lot more power alright one other thing I want to mention and then I'm going to call it a night is this thing up here on the top of my camera and this is something that's definitely not the topic of tonight but it's part of the topic of tonight but it's a more advanced concept this is called a guide scope and you guys what this does is this notice it has its own little telescope and this is actually a camera right here this is a very sensitive specialty astronomy camera what this little guy does is it watches a nearby star so if you think about it if you've got the Andromeda galaxy and that's what the camera is pointed at this little guy is pointed at some star near the end rahmatu galaxy that makes sense you guys this little camera is way more sensitive to slight movement then my big DSLR is so if my mount starts to kind of fail at all or not quite track perfectly my guide scope is gonna see it and my guide camera is gonna see it before my DSLR picks up any sort of movement because this is more sensitive well you'll notice this guide scope is plugged into the mount so what happens is and this is amazing technology if you guys get more into it this is what you'll get into this little camera will actually send corrections to the mount to adjust for any tracking error and it does all of that before the camera notices anything going on so your camera shot the shot that the DSLR takes is perfect because this little guy is way more sensitive than what your camera is so it's able to see those my new variations and that's called a guide scope and a guide camera and they're there just for the purposes of keeping things more aligned alright so I know that was a lot of information for you guys I know that was fun I hope it was fun actually I don't know that it was fun hopefully you had fun let me move this out of the way and let me just summarize your quick so here's the thing you guys uh astrophotography it's one of those things that i think a lot of people can have a lot of fun with and i think a lot of people think it's harder than it actually is it's really not that challenging you go out there and you know we didn't go into specific software programs and how to use them but there are so many youtube tutorials out there on how to do all of that stuff I kind of wanted to give you guys just a rough overview on what you can expect to be an astrophotographer and to start getting your feet wet so my assignment to all of you I can't give you assignments because it's a free lecture but if you wanted to have an assignment is to the next clear night especially here in the winter just go outside with a long lens if you only have a 100 millimeter maybe you only have the kit lens on your camera like an 18 to 55 that's fine get Stellarium that free program that free planetarium program look around and maybe find a chunk of sky with a few objects in it in fact Stellarium even has this cool ability and you'll have to google it how to do this where you can tell stellarium what camera and what lens you're using and it will show you on the sky with that camera lens how much of the sky will be in the picture and so you can kind of move it around and compose and find a chunk of sky with a lot of little objects in it with your 18 to 55 millimeter lens the advantage of having only in 18 to 55 is what the 400 rule you can use a what 8 secconds shutter speed while the 70 to 200 people can only use a two-second shutter speed so count yourselves lucky in some respects go out and shoot something go out still area and plan it put it together in deep sky stacker and just see what you end up with alright Andy yes yeah ah that's a great question so these are made by yeah so you guys um the guide scope and the guide camera that I use particularly I actually use a different one at my observatory at home but this one and this is the one I would recommend for most of you guys is a made by a company called qhy CCD qhy CCD CCD is a type of sensor qhy is the brand into the qhy cc and they make both the camera and the scope and the cool thing is about that little setup is because they're both made by the same company they screw together perfectly they focus well there's all these good things when if you start getting in more into astronomy and buying telescopes you'll quickly learn that you need all these weird adapters to get things to focus correctly there's all these different things so because those are both made by the same company it makes things super easy alright any questions from you guys in here all right well good deal thank you guys so much for watching or watching listening whatever it happens to be I really appreciate it and yeah thank you guys [Applause] isn't astro fun so good so good

Channel: Rocky Mountain School of Photography

Views: 185,490

Rating: 4.8786597 out of 5

Keywords: astrophotography, getting started in astrophotography, astrophotography basics, fundamentals of astrophotography, how to get started in astrophotography, how to shoot the night sky, how to photograph a galaxy, how to photograph a nebula, how to take photos of space, basics of astrophotography, night photography, taking photos of the night sky, deep sky astrophotography, deep sky imaging

Id: KLVCuvRHrf4

Length: 93min 53sec (5633 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2018