Photographing Deep Space Objects in ORION | Star Adventurer 2i

all right so i've got the sony 55 millimeter f 1.8 on my astro modified sony a7 3 and they are both mounted onto the star adventurer 2 i and that's kind of been sent to me by the guys at sky watcher australia so many many thanks to those guys for sending me this gift this is not a sponsored video and if you've followed me for long enough you know that i've been using the star adventurer pro for a few years now already but i'm just going to do some tracking on orion and create a nice wide field image of the orion molecular cloud complex i'm going to use that image to show you guys some of the deep space objects that you can find within the constellation orion and then i'm going to pull out my 400 millimeter lens and we're gonna photograph some of those deep space targets and test out the star adventure too so stick around to see how i go about capturing and editing these images [Music] [Music] so this is a single exposure with a 55 millimeter lens at f4 180 seconds and iso 640 but after stacking 28 images a total of one hour and 24 minutes i was able to pull out much more detail and color resulting in this image here the orion molecular cloud complex it's a huge collection of gas and dust a star forming region found within the milky way between 1 000 and 1 400 light years away from earth the most obvious feature is of course the bright orion nebula located in orion's sword it's visible to the naked eye from dark skies and will even show up in your wide angle images it's a great target for beginners despite it also being quite tricky due to its high dynamic range but i'll explain that a bit more later now if we zoom in to the star allen attack one of the three stars that makes up orion's belt we will find the flame and horsehead nebulae no prizes for guessing where they get their names from the horsehead nebula is a dark nebula that stands out proudly against a backdrop of a h2 reason red in color due to the prominence of hydrogen alpha emissions making it a great target for astro modified cameras lastly if we zoom into the star rigel orion's foot we will find the witch head nebula it's a reflection nebula illuminated mainly by the light from the nearby star rigel and it's certainly going to be the most difficult to capture and it's a target that i haven't photographed before either so i'm pretty excited and as the skies are clear outside i'm gonna get straight outside and set up so my biggest issue right now is that i'm based deep in a west facing valley so there's big mountains blocking my view of the southern horizon and there's big mountains blocking the view of the northern horizon so it's difficult to find a spot where i can see polaris the north star whenever i found a spot that i could see polaris it was often on some sort of wooden platform or balcony so the slightest bit of wind and there was camera shake especially when shooting at 400 mil but eventually i found a spot where i could see polaris and it had a nice solid stone floor but it was right in the middle of the camp i'm staying in so there's often people around and often music playing so it's very difficult for me to vlog which is why i'm coming at you in the form of voiceover right now now the center column on my tripod doesn't rotate so it's important that when i set up my tripod the polar wedge is facing roughly north and then it's very important to level your tripod as well then i add the star adventurer to eye also the declination bracket and the polar scope illuminator ready for some rough polar alignment first i make sure that the altitude of the polar wedge is set to my current latitude which here in southwest turkey is 36 degrees north so i make sure the polar wedge is set to 36 degrees then on the side of the star adventurer is a little hole known as a polar sight and i make sure that polaris is within this hole so that when i do go to do my polar alignment polaris is already in view and that's good enough polar alignment for now next i add the counterweight as well as my camera and lens and it's time to balance the system so one of the things i love about the star adventure pro is that you can physically move the entire declination bracket to help balance the system and then you can make some fine adjustments using the counterweight and just sliding it along the rail and then once your system is balanced you should be able to just reposition your camera and it shouldn't rotate and it stays in position now i roughly frame my target and at this point you should really check the balance because repositioning your camera can sometimes affect the balance but in my case i was fine and now it's time to make fine-tuned adjustments to my composition so another thing that i love about the star adventurer pro is that you can very easily fine-tune your composition so you can turn the knob on the declination bracket to make fine adjustments to the declination and then you can use the arrow buttons on the side of the star adventure to make small adjustments in the right ascension and if your lens is on a collar you have another axis of rotation for composition as you can rotate your camera and orientate your target now it's time to focus so i zoom in on a bright star and manually focus and now i'm nearly ready to shoot i just need to fine-tune my polar alignment so i check the exact position the polaris needs to be in the reticle using the start adventurer mini console app and then i adjust the altitude and azimuth accordingly so this is my setup for the deep space targets i've got my sony 100 to mil on my astro modified a7 iii and that's all on top of the star adventurer 2. and in the past i've always used cool lens warmers but recently i've been trying out the kiwi lens warmer but i've had a lot of issues with it turning off after like half an hour of usage and it turns out that when it gets hot enough it doesn't draw much power from the power bank and so the power bank automatically turns off after a little search on the internet i found out that if you double press the button on the center of the anchor power core one of the blue lights turns green which puts it into trickle charging mode so even when the voltage drops low it should still continue to provide power to the lens warmer and it shouldn't automatically turn off so hopefully that helps some of you out there as well not make the same mistake okay so i'm going to pause the video here because it turned out that this wasn't the whole problem it turns out the kiwi lens warmer that i was using has a built-in timer of one hour which you cannot turn off so after one hour of use it just automatically turns off and there's no way of stopping this but according to the amazon reviews it's been updated and it now comes without the time limit so in that case i'd highly recommend this lens warmer but make sure you don't get one that has a one hour time limit because it's really annoying anyway back to the video now normally i'd use an intervalometer to control my camera shutter my favorite being the pixel tw283 but the star adventurer 2i has built-in wi-fi so you can connect it to your camera using the cable and then use the star adventurer mini console app on your phone to dial in your settings so there's a number of different modes that i'll look into in a future video but for now i'm just using the normal astrophotography mode this allows me to choose my shutter speed and also choose the interval between each exposure the number of exposures you want to take and then you choose the tracking rate so obviously see the reel for the stars solar for the sun luna for the moon half speed if you want to include a landscape as well but still get a few extra seconds without star trailing there's also a double speed mode which i'm not quite sure what it would be used for at the moment and then there's a custom option as well which i'm gonna look into there's an option for dithering which again i'll look into a future video i'm not sure how necessary it is and then an option to turn off wi-fi which will save you battery whilst it's tracking but then you can't reconnect to the device to see how many shots you've taken and how much time is left and then you can save all of those settings as profiles which will make setting up quicker next time i'll share my positive and negative thoughts about this app in a future review because i don't want to jump to conclusions straight away i'm all set up i'm polar aligned i can just about see polaris from this position this hard ground and with the original star adventurer i normally use about one minute 30 second exposures and get about a 50 success rate so i'm gonna stick to that for now so i'm shooting at one minute 30 f 5.6 iso 640 we're going to see how that goes [Music] okay so although i just mentioned i was going to shoot at one minute and 30 seconds i actually changed my mind last minute and reduced it to just one minute and that was in order to prevent the detail in the highlights of the core from blowing out this is what makes the orion nebula a little bit tricky it has a very bright core but then there are also amazing faint details in the darker regions too so it's a high dynamic range target so for the right nebula i ended up shooting at 60 seconds f 5.6 which is the largest aperture you can use at 400 mil with the sony lens and then iso 640 which is the lower limit of iso invariance on the sony a7 iii and this is what a single exposure looks like i captured 67 exposures in total so 67 minutes and out of those 37 had nice round stars which i marked in green 26 were unusable mainly from periodic era those i marked in red and then there were four which had a little bit of trailing it was still usable for the stacking process and i marked those in yellow so adding the green and yellow that gave a success rate of 61 totaling 41 minutes of usable exposures after stacking and editing this was my final image now you can see a lot more of the fainter details and i must admit i'm not quite happy with the core but i think it's a great result considering i only used exposures of the same settings not a hdr technique now i really wanted to show the editing process in this video as well but i'm really busy at the moment and i really wanted to get this video out in january so i'll save the editing for a separate video hopefully next month so make sure to hit subscribe and if you haven't already hit the bell icon to make sure you get notified of my new videos next up was the flame and horse heading everyday and this time i did use one minute and 30 seconds as it's a much fainter target and there's no bright core to worry about blowing out so this is what a single exposure looks like and this time i took 49 exposures totaling 73 minutes 30 seconds out of the 49 there were 25 green 4 yellow and 19 red given a success rate of about 59 surprisingly similar to the one minute exposures of the orion nebula and very similar to what i used to get with the star adventurer one but after stacking and editing this is what my final image looked like also i mentioned at the start of the video that my camera is astro modified that i've made an entire video about this which i'll link above and down below but essentially i've had filters in front of the sensor removed so that it is four times more sensitive to hydrogen alpha emission light which you can see as the deep red color in this image you can still take this kind of photo with a non-modified camera but it will take much longer to get a similar result at least four times longer i'm kind of happy with the result i could certainly do with a lot more data to unveil the fainter details and there's still a fair bit of visible noise in there so i'll probably take more exposures and add that data to this data and hopefully improve the result as for the witch head nebula i use the same exposure settings as the flame and horse head nebulae which is pretty much my limit for this setup one minute 30 second exposures f 5.6 the widest aperture i can use at 400 mil this time around i took 136 exposures totaling 204 minutes or 3 hours and 24 minutes 16 were ruined by cloud so i marked those in purple then there were 53 that were green 26 yellow a big increase on the previous two so i'm not sure if my polar alignment was a little bit off and then 41 red so including the yellows there was a success rate of 53 again similar to the previous result and very similar to what i got with the original star adventurer and this is what a single exposure looks like you can barely see the witch head nebula at all but after stacking and editing i was able to unveil the conspicuous witch head shape i'm pretty happy with the results considering the setup and how faint this target is it's just a large collection of gas and dust reflecting the light of nearby stars unlike the previous targets which were emitting their own light or blocking the light in the case of the dark horsehead nebula but i could definitely do with more exposures here as i had to do a lot of stretching the data to unveil the faint details which simultaneously unveils a fair amount of noise as well but overall i'm happy with this result especially as it's the first time i've photographed it and it's always nice to add a new target a new subject to your collection but that is all for now guys i'll share my thoughts and review about the star adventurer 2 soon and i'll also try and get the editing video out next month as well so thanks for watching another astro vlog and if you're going out to enjoy the night sky anytime soon i wish you good luck and clear skies [Music] you

Channel: Alyn Wallace

Views: 109,772

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Id: xnS8e6kPQ1g

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021