N.I.N.A. Basic Setup Walkthrough

[Music] so I've been meaning to make a video on some software that I use for master photography there are a group of an absurdist drama sci de deux make their own version of sequencing software because they just weren't really thrilled with the results they were getting with other software or just felt like they needed better features or whatever the reason they went ahead and made their own software and it's called lena or nighttime imaging and astronomy and their open source it's free you can grab it right off the internet here's their website you can see it is nighttime - imaging at you and you can go there and grab the latest version of it in my case i'm still using version 1.9 but they do have a new nightly build out here so they're constantly working on it constantly updating making fixes and adding little features here and there based on feedback so it's a really active new tool now there are other tools out there sequence generator Pro is a really popular one but it is not free some other tools like astrophotography tool or apt have some of these things built-in as well but I decided to go ahead and grab this version of a sequencing tool something that's going to integrate all these different things together into one package and as you start getting into astrophotography and you end up getting a little bit more in-depth into your setup and getting to the target having something like Neeta is going to be extremely helpful let me go ahead and bring up Nina I have this installed and I actually have it running on my remote computer right now I've got a little stick computer attached to my mount and so this is actually remote desktop into that computer now I've got everything set up it's all turned on and if I want to I can go ahead and fire it up before I do that though I want to mention a few things about the initial setup of Dena so first things first when you go into Nina and you set up your options there are a few things that you're really going to want to make sure that you do I would go into my options and make a new profile for any equipment combination that I want camera telescope do I have a reducer or flattener involved how much this all helps me make sure they get everything set up and I can quickly switch between profiles when I change equipment so that's something that I'll do and I've got a few already put together here but I just made a new one when you have that selected and it's active you've loaded it you can make sure to go give it a name call it whatever you want and then you can choose to point towards if you download the optional sky Atlas image directory so that when you search for stuff offline it may actually come up with a picture which is pretty cool again that's optional you can customize the color scheme to anything that you want and you also want to make sure that you input specifically your coordinates your latitude and longitude this is in decimal so don't use the degrees minutes seconds use decimal and you can grab that from something like hard to sell or Stellarium if you're using those or you can grab it from GPS if you're using a GPS enabled device which I am NOT once you've got this part done you can move over really equipment and you can set up a few things so specifically pixel size and some information just about your camera the bit depth of your raw images and your general full-wall capacity you don't need to do the full low capacity but that can help with a few other things like the flats wizard and stuff like that you can also adjust and set up your telescope so you would tell it whatever you have so if you've got say a celestron grass 8 inch or something like that you can go ahead and add in a name focal length whatever that happens to be and focal ratio if that happens to be correct I don't know I don't have a rassa but anyway you put in your telescope information you can choose to input information if you're using automatic focusing or using filter wheels if you're using guiding through PhD to you want to make sure that you also set this up over on the side here so we can put in some information about the equipment then for imaging we would go in and set up a file path and a pattern for how you want it to name your pictures where do you want them stored so you might change a few things in here like I use a DSLR I don't need to have sense of sensor temperature in there so take that out and you can input anything else you want they have little snippets on the bottom there too so if you want you can just double click on these and it will go ahead and add that into the path for you pretty straightforward DSLR as you can see it'll always be saved in its native RAW format for your mount if your imaging do you want it to do automated Meridian flips we can turn that on if you'd like you can also tell it some information about previewing or taking quick snapshots for getting things set up how do you want it to do with the imaging plate solving is another fantastic feature I highly recommend if you're gonna use Nina or sequence generator Pro or apt or whatever tool if it has plate solving use it this has completely revolutionized the way that I image because now I don't have to hunt for anything my system has backlash in it when I tell it to go and point at something it'll turn and it'll get close but it's not gonna get it spot on it might be off a little bit it might be off a bunch and the best part about plate solving is it will automatically find the center for you it will figure out where it's actually pointed sync up with your mount tell it what the coordinates really are and then it will adjust the scope to point exactly where you want it so highly recommend using plate solving if you can I use the recommended solver from the folks who built Nina called ASCAP and so when you select that you also want to make sure you select your plate solver settings and tell it exactly where you have a step installed you can get a stat from their general website i've got their website here this is a chen Scott at org slash as tab HTM you can grab the a step installer for Windows or Linux or whatever you're running on a Raspberry Pi and also make sure that you grab the database if you don't grab the database it won't know how to play it solve it needs the database to understand where the stars are in the night sky so make sure you grab both the installer for ask tab and the database so pretty straightforward once you set that up it's really not a big deal how wide of a search do you want to wanted to search based on the coordinates you tell it to start from if you're blind solving you might make this radius fairly large if you're starting from a set of known coordinates this doesn't need to be very big so we've got plate solving and then the planetarium so if you're trying to pick out targets and frame or whatever you can use a planetarium software of your choice they've got a few options here some of the really popular ones hard to sell is a free planetarium software works really well it's fairly basic as far as the image quality goes for when you're looking at night sky objects but it works really well connects to your mount really easily stellarium is another popular one but I know some folks have issues with getting ecomod set up so that it works well with your scope and they just switch over to using CDC instead if you've got the sky x or something else you can use that as well now when you pick that it will ask you if it's hosted over network otherwise you just kind of leave it alone if it's on the same computer you don't need to change anything here so that's the basic setup alright once you go through this process you create a profile set up anything that you want give it a name and set up your color scheme put in your coordinates all that stuff it feels like there's a lot but once you've got it there you're done you don't have to keep changing anything it's already set ready to go the only thing you might change is with a portable setup adjust your longitude and latitude to wherever it is that you happen to be located maybe you make a copy of your profile so you don't have to mess with it later and put it back but either way that's probably one of the few things you might actually tweak in here so I've already got my equipment set up once I have that if I load up my profile I'll pick one of the ones I've already got going on I use this one that can go over to equipment and I can connect everything now since I'm remoted in I've turned everything on I have it in sight so I can't really point it at anything but I can tell it to scan for things individually if I want to you see there went ahead and here's all different cameras and stuff that you can tell to look for but if you're using the same equipment there's just a connect button here and it'll connect all the things that it can all at one time now it may not be able to connect everything if you also have it connecting guiding then it will fire up PhD 2 for you it connects EQ mod you can see my scope is currently parked it fires up PhD 2 connects my guide cam all that fun stuff so I don't have to do it all manually I would still have to in PhD to tell it to connect my equipment here so now everything is fired up it's connected so I had to turn my camera on but now it should be able to find it then go in here here's Mike 70 mark to select that connect it up so you can do individual pieces you can do here's the rotator you can see just hitting the connect button it found the telescope already and if you turn on guiding alright PhD 2 you can connect it disconnect it as you need to so we've got all those things connected again they're optional you don't to do every one of them you could just do the camera you could just do the rotator you could just do the telescope the guider you don't have to do all of these if you don't have them you could just do what you do have like just a camera in the telescope so so these are all fired up now everything's connected I can click on each one see what their settings are manually pick things like gain or if I go over the rotator I've got a manual rotator so I can't move it if you had a automated rotator you could tell it to rotate and Stefan here now finding stuff inside of Nina is pretty simple there are a couple ways to go about it you can use the sky Atlas so what I could do is I could search for something like m42 Orion really common target these days especially in the winter time we can really easily find Ryan in the night sky there it is so I can take that and I can push it over into a sequence or the framing assistant another option that you might have is instead of using this you could go straight into the framing assistant and use whatever you picked out from your planetarium software so if I'm using something like car to sell and I go in to connect my telescope to it so now the mount is fired up so for instance if I go in here and I find something like maybe I want to look for the flame nebula which is near the Horsehead Nebula as well so I can go ahead and find whatever it is that I want and this is gonna at least get me close so maybe I'll pick something nearby or you could even choose to try and try and Center on a particular spot maybe in the middle here somewhere so once you've chosen a target here that will potentially be useful when you go over to Nina so if I switch back to Nina I can actually tell it to find coordinates from my planetarium software so if I click on that you'll see it went ahead and found the specific target I was already pointing to ad so that might be a great way to do this because in CDC you might be able to see your target a little more easily especially if you're working offline if you've got Internet connectivity you can actually go into Nina and you can pick one of these other sky surveys or use the NASA Sky Survey it will pull up an actual picture that you can see but if you're using the offline framing and tell it to load this up it's going to come in as something that's a little simpler so really not something that you can necessarily see exactly what you have going on and in that case I'm gonna have to just kind of figure it out right we just kind of drag click and drag until we get something that's pretty close to where I think I want it it's really not that easy to try and Center everything up here so because I don't necessarily have a great picture of what I'm looking at I'm gonna have to guess and I don't really like guessing too much so I know we've got the flame nebula and we've got the horse head nebula but I don't really know exactly what orientation they're in unless I really know the night sky so if I mean something like CDC or Stellarium if you want you can actually set up things related to your camera on your telescope so if I want to can go into the general settings and I can look at things like the finder circle for an eyepiece or the finder rectangle for a camera and if I want I can add my own into here you can actually just click on an empty row give it a width give it a high standard rotation and offset and that will help you make sure that you get everything set the way that you want it and that way when you are looking for your target you can actually see you know your your orientation around your target I can't see that necessarily without loading up images inside Nina if you're if you're online then it's not so bad but if you're offline they do have an option to load up offline images for the sky Atlas but I don't have that in this instance so I would set up my framing the way I want it you can adjust things like your rotation to help you figure out exactly where you want things to go let me go like here and you want to make sure that your camera parameters are correct otherwise if they're not like my scope is really more like five hundred and eighty millimeters you can see that it's much larger if you don't have the right focal length it's gonna make it hard to frame the object correctly now once I got my framing good whether I did it here or I grabbed the coordinates off of my planetarium software and just adjusted something like rotation once I have that I can go ahead and add this as a sequence target or I can just manually slew to it that's fine but I can go ahead and set this as my target when you're on the sequencing section or sequencing tab setting this up is pretty straightforward I just give this a name and actually this is the and I usually put in a date and that way when it names my pictures based on my options it it will actually be pretty darn close it'll separate my pictures between different imaging sessions based on the date naming the folder once you've got that in here you can choose to do a handful of things you can delay the start so if you need to walk away let the vibration die down and so on that's fine you can start guiding you can tell it to go ahead and move to the target so if you're not already pointed at it it will go ahead and slew there and then once it does that you can turn on center target that's your plate solving so it will take a quick snapshot compare it against the database and say am i pointed in the right spot yes or no if it's not it will nudge the scope and it will do another solve it will take another snapshot try and solve it as it is it in the right spot now if it's not it will keep nudging it until it's within the tolerance that you've set inside of your options for plate solving so that's pretty straightforward once you got that just make sure you don't set your tolerance to small like 0.1 seconds or something 0.1 arc seconds or within like 0.1 degrees of rotation if you do that it's gonna make it really tough to get everything spot-on and stacking doesn't need it to be that close anyway so I usually set it to somewhere like mmm within maybe a couple of arc minutes depending on the size of your image too if you're using a long focal length versus short but if you're using you know a short focal length then maybe a couple of minutes and then also rotation within maybe five degrees or something that's good enough if you're using autofocus you can turn this stuff on here and adjust settings I don't have that but setting up a sequence pretty straightforward you tell how many images you want so let's say four light frames I want thirty light frames and then what is your exposure time I'll say hundred twenty seconds do you have any filters I don't know filter wheel but if you did you could pick a filter you can tell it if there's binning for your particular camera I don't have that because it's a DSLR do you want to dither so it's going to nudge it just a little bit in between frames so that you're stacking can really do a good job of canceling out noise and then how often do you want to do there if you're only taking a small number you want to do there probably every frame if you're doing a large number like forty fifty sixty a hundred images you might did there every two or three frames just so that you don't have to waste time while it's dithering and you don't have to have that many dinners with a large number of frames and then here's your cameras gain value so these are my ISO settings for my camera I could pick that here if you've got multiple items that you want to do maybe separate line items for multiple light frames maybe different game settings you could do that so maybe bump down the gain and shrink my exposure time for imaging say Orion's core right because the core is really bright we might need to do a little bit of HDR so I can take the core brightness down a little bit and really get that detail to come out so you do the same thing here again do you want to dither at all and then it also does other types of frames so if you want you can have it do darks I don't usually do flats here I'll use the flat wizard on the left hand side here but you can maybe I'll do bias frames and dark frames because those are pretty straightforward and I have to do those anyway with my DSLR so I'll add a dark frame in here same setting if I've got multiple items I might have to do you know settings for each one dark frames for 400 dark frames for 800 and so on but I can go ahead and add those if you do do dark frames in here the dark frames will tell you to put the lens cap on so it will pause tell you to put the cap on and then you click OK or continue to have it start taking darks so again really not too bad if you're using a filter wheel then you might be able to just switch to a black filter like a an opaque filter that you can use to take dark frames which is kind of nice I don't have a filter wheel so I would just put the lens cap on once you've got that you can go ahead and hit play I'm not gonna do that because I don't want to slew the scope in the house but you can go ahead and do that and it will turn the scope start the plate solving fire up the guiding once it's solved and often running you can add multiple targets so you can do additional sequence items using the plus on the top here if you want to try and image multiple targets in a single night I can't do that because I'd have to stay up all night but if I had a backyard where I could leave it out all night or maybe an observatory that I could just have my equipment fairly sheltered maybe I would do that but you can actually have to do that you can have it slow to multiple targets take a bunch of pictures on one target take a bunch of take pictures on another target take another bunch of pictures on a third target and it will just do that as long as you want all night long assuming it's got power you can add multiple sequence items if you want to so that's pretty much it as far as the way that nina works how you set it up how you configure the equipment how you would start at the sequence how you find targets and add them to the sequence hopefully this is all pretty straightforward but if you have comments about anything just let me know there are a couple other items like there's the flat wizard this is if you want to use Nina to take flats it'll try and find the ideal exposure time for you you would give it number of flats to take dark flats same thing I'll tell you to put the cap on before it takes those you can set your cameras gain value for the flats if you want to it'll use the same value for the dark flats and then you can tell it this step size the increment exposure time to try and find the ideal histogram or ideal exposure time I'll use this usually like the next day I'll point it at a white screen and take some flats using the same focus point as the night before so that's pretty much it again any questions leave them down in the comments otherwise hopefully this was helpful if there are additional questions I might end up making another short video to try and answer some of those I'm by no means an expert at this so you may have questions on things like auto focusing or rotating that I don't have equipment for and I don't know how to do those things yet but again leave me some questions comments and maybe I'll see you again next time you [Music]

Channel: ESPhotoCreations

Views: 12,472

Keywords: astrophotography, PHD2, N.I.N.A., imaging, astronomy, Cartes du Ciel, DSO, deep sky object, sequencing, SGP, Sequence Generator Pro, Stellarium, EQMOD, ASCOM, tutorial, instruction, beginner

Id: IIWD6VmtZVg

Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Noobulosity]

I've posted here before, but under my main account. I made an alt just to separate out my astrophotography posts. (Not sure if that's really relevant, but there you go...lol.)

I had a lot of questions when I started adding a computer to my imaging regimen, particularly when I set up N.I.N.A. to help integrate everything into a single interface.  I figured others may have similar queries and/or concerns, so I made a walkthrough video of the basic program setup and integration of N.I.N.A. with PHD2 and Cartes du Ciel.  It's not a super-detailed step-by-step video, but hopefully it transfers some knowledge across to help get things up and running.

If you have questions or comments, I'd love to hear them.  But note that I'm not the creator of the program, nor am I an advanced imager.  I also don't have all the hardware that N.I.N.A. can utilize (i.e. auto-focusing, motorized rotating, etc.).  So, I may not be able to answer some of the questions that come up.

I just wanted to pass along what I've learned. Hopefully this works in this sub. I figured it fell into the helpful links category. If not allowed, let me know and I can remove it.