NEBULA Photography with a Cheap DSLR & Lens

hi everyone this is Trevor Jones from Astro backyard comm and in this video I'm going to photograph a nebula in the night sky in my backyard tonight using this rig here this camera can be found on eBay for under 200 dollars even 150 it's an old DSLR from 2011 and will work just fine for capturing deep sky Astro photography with a camera lens like this it may sound unbelievable when you consider all the expensive dedicated astronomy cameras that have come out in the last 10 years but this old DSLR is capable of capturing incredible images of the night sky as you can see here I've got a Rokinon one 35 millimeter f/2 lens attached to the camera it's sitting on a star tracker mountain the sky watchers star adventurer but this is essentially the exact rig I'm going to be using in the backyard with a few more accessories that do heater van and a remote shutter release cable the reason I wanted to make this video is because people get hung up in the fact that Astro photography is really expensive but really with a simple rig like this I'm going to prove to you that from an ordinary backyard in the city you can get astonishing results [Music] you can find this camera on eBay for under $200 here's a few examples I found close to the 150 range some of them even come with lenses the only difference between that one and the version you see here is that this one's been modified so all that means is that this stock IR cut filter has been removed and it's just the naked sensor mod so nothing else was replaced just that IR cut filter that blocks out the red colors that are no good for daytime photography but it's so important for astrophotography and that's been removed you can do this modification yourself and that's exactly what I did with my previous DSLR for astrophotography the XSI you go in there take it apart pry it off with an exacto knife you really need to follow the instructions but it's interesting that some of the newer DSLRs it's a lot harder to do this modification yourself and you're better off actually sending it away for a professional to do but these older ones such as the t3i and the XS I and XS you could really do yourself if you follow along with the YouTube video so I'm sticking with that this camera is still under $200 if you modify it yourself for free the star tracker this the star adventurer here really is the key to the whole thing and why it works with that star tracker now I can take long exposure tracked images of the night sky which is the key to taking deep sky Astro photography images there's also a filter inside the camera if I was under dark skies I wouldn't need that filter or just a UV IR cut filter but I've got a light pollution filter in there the sky Tech's Els CCD just to help me capture an image with better contrast that ignores a lot of the city light pollution I'm used to in the backyard I think you'll find that there's a lot of capable older DSLRs that are great for astrophotography what makes this t3i so special specifically one of the main things is Believe It or Not this flip out screen so handy for astrophotography being able to flip it out when you're focusing on stars or you've got to point it up and you need to see the screen another cool thing is that you can very easily and affordably run it using AC power I've got the battery in there now but you can actually put a dummy battery in the bottom and then the other end you can actually plug into AC power so then you're powering the camera through AC power not relying on that battery which will die quickly so to look at the camera settings I used for my photos and these are pretty typical of all the Ostrow photography images I take with this camera whether it's through a lens or telescope so you want it in manual mode normally you'll be shooting it in ball mode which is just beyond 30 seconds ISO 1600 which is a bit aggressive some people like to use more like 800 or 400 this camera the noise profile 1600 seems to be the sweet spot where you can actually pick up a little more signal but still remove that noise through calibration don't worry about white balance you can adjust that because we're shooting the files in raw mode so we can adjust that after the fact so yeah just a really capable little camera and one last thing the remote shutter release cable on the side door here there's a spot for that this is the remote shutter release cable I use and that allows me to automate a sequence of exposures that just plugs in here and then there's no need for a laptop or anything to run your session you can just use this little remote shutter release cable and when you're keeping equipment to a minimum and setup time something like this is really handy it's going down to minus 17 degrees Celsius tonight so a very cold night here in Ontario Canada and that's a good and bad thing so hopefully that is not too cold for this star tracker it will be really hard on the batteries the batteries are gonna die quicker on the star tracker and in the camera itself the good thing about that cold weather though is that sensor in the camera isn't gonna get very hot it's probably gonna hover around somewhere around 0 to minus 5 degrees which is great for keeping noise at bay the other thing to deal with with this cold weather is that the lens will frost up after probably about 30 minutes 45 minutes so I'll need a dew heater band which I'll wrap around the lens hood on the camera lens and that will keep it warm enough so it just doesn't frost over speaking of the lens if you're looking for a camera lens for astrophotography the Rokinon 135 millimeter f2 an extraordinary lens for this purpose it's a relatively affordable camera lens that can shoot with that fast F ratio of F 2.0 which is really important when it comes to astrophotography because you can really control the amount of light that's hitting that sensor in each exposure next up I'm going to hop outside set everything up go over some of the camera settings I'm gonna use to photograph this target tell you what the target is and my plans for shooting it tonight hopefully it stays clear I'm not sure if you can tell or not but it is bitterly cold out here it's about minus 10 now and dropping so that's one of the main reasons I set up a rig like this on a night like tonight I want to spend as little time as possible out here so setting up a big robust deep sky rig with a telescope and a heavy tripod and a heavy mount that would take about 45 minutes maybe to an hour to set it up properly and that would just crush my fingers so this takes about 10 minutes to set up I can still do my Astro photography thing even though it's so cold but I don't have to stay out with it for long periods of time so the next steps now are just waiting for it to get dark out so I can pull or align them out and then I'm going to slow over to my target focus and my target by the way is the horse head nebula in Orion and surrounding area it's just gonna be an incredible shot at 135 millimeters it's very important as I said that I put the dew heater bands on here to keep the lens warm so it doesn't frost over I've also got the dummy battery in the DSLRs so I can plug the DSLR into AC power that battery would die within an hour if I didn't yeah so far so good I'm going inside to warm up from them but I'm in Orion's belt you can actually see the Orion Nebula and the belt stars I'll zoom in so you can see it so that's actually the Orion Nebula there you can see that kind of a glow and then those are the three belt stars over here and the Horsehead Nebula is near this star here which is Allen attack so I know that it's in there so right now I'll know that I'll get the Horsehead Nebula and the Orion Nebula in a single field of view this is a great time to focus the lens - so I'm at f/2 wide open and when i zoom in on these stars and adjust the focus ring it's a really nice tension on the focus ring on the Rokinon 135 there we go in a note and write a boat there is as sharp as I can get it and then I'm gonna click stops down click 2f 2.8 that'll sharpen things up just a little bit so I'm going to be shooting my images at F 2.8 just to sharpen things up and lose a little bit of light gathering power but that's okay 2.8 still pretty fast [Music] [Music]

Channel: AstroBackyard

Views: 856,479

Rating: 4.7775679 out of 5

Keywords: astrophotography, DSLR camera, Camera Settings, Camera Lens, Which Camera to Use, Astrophotography Camera, Astrophotography Lens, How to, Photography, Beginner

Id: 4a8pRirTe_8

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020