Shooting & Processing Orion Nebula with a DSLR and Tripod, NO TRACKER - Astrophotography Tutorial

you're watching this video because you want to take photos of space like this using only a tripod and a camera which is gear you probably already have good because we're going to dip our toes into the waters of astro photography and i'm going to tell you literally everything you need to know to take this photo from shooting the photo itself all the way to the end of processing it i've included timestamps of each section in the description so you can skip around after if you need to let's jump in first let's talk about gear what camera and tripod do i recommend you use you can really use any type of tripod you want i recommend extending the legs as opposed to the center column that way it's more stable so don't do this do this next is the camera and you can use a dslr or a mirrorless you want to make sure it has a delay shutter release because you don't want to touch the camera while the photo's exposing and lastly you want to make sure it has a high iso anything around 6400 is more than fine in my case i used the rebel t6 which did surprisingly well for this project and lastly a telephoto lens the key here is a low f-stop because we want our aperture to be as wide as possible we also want to make sure it has a long focal length to capture detail in the nebula the bottom line is kit lenses will work and you should use what you have in my case i use the canon ef 75 to 300 millimeter telephoto lens this is a lens that often comes as a promotional gift when you buy canon cameras now this isn't a particularly fast lens and it's not a particularly expensive camera in fact i got the lens the camera as well as another lens off of craigslist for around 200 bottom line if you have a digital camera and a telephoto lens you probably have everything you need for this photo and you're good to go let's talk next about location and there's a few things you want to consider firstly you want to make sure you have a clear view of the sky unobstructed by buildings or trees specifically if you're in the northern hemisphere look south and if you're in the southern hemisphere look north because this is where the orion nebula will be secondly you also want to try to avoid light pollution as much as possible that being said this is not necessary in fact the orion nebula is so bright you could even take a photo of it from places like this if you want to see what light pollution looks like in your area go to light pollution map dot info i'll put a link in the description it's basically a heat map of sky brightness across the entire world the areas of red and pink are areas where it's brightest or border class 8 and 9 in the areas where it's gray skies that are darkest or border class 1. you can go to the top left hand corner and enter in the address where you plan to shoot once you click on that address the map will then zoom into that specific location you can then left-click on that location to see the portal class rating in this case we can see the skies are going to be the darkest now to set your expectations i actually shot this from my front yard which is border class 6 skies so it's not too too dark now you also want to avoid direct light pollution so make sure you stay away from things like street lamps or house lights or even ufo lights as all these can cause glares in your images street lamps are great ninety-nine percent of time especially if you're a moth but fresh to photography they're terrible as a final note you also want to make sure you're allowed to be in that area after dusk because a many parks have roles and b there might actually be ghosts let's talk next about time and when the best time of the year is to take this photo if you're like most people you probably feel regret the next morning after spending a late night and you probably don't do too well if that's you then the best time is during the december to march time frame that's because the orion constellation will be highest in the sky earliest in the evening that said you can shoot this in the early evening hours of april as well as the late evening hours of october and november and it's great because you can see the orion constellation from practically anywhere in the world so whether you're tuning in from switzerland or australia you can give this a go you also want to try to take this photo as close to the new moon as possible this is when the moon is the least illuminated by the sun as it goes to its lunar phases it becomes increasingly illuminated and then decreasingly illuminated now this is ideal but not necessary in fact i actually shot this photo during an 87 illuminated moon which looks something like this now while this can be done as a general rule of thumb for astrophotography you want to do your best to avoid the moon so shoot during the new moon time moving right along let's talk next about camera settings and if you're a photographer you'll know the first thing is to change your camera to manual mode this will give us greater control you also want to make sure you change it to manual focus because we're going to need to focus on the stars now chances are many of these settings that i'm using will look like the ones that you're using but you may have to adjust them in my case i'm using one second exposures but you'll have to do some math to figure out what's best for you let me explain as we know the earth is not stationary but is tilted and rotates on its axis from the north celestial pole to the south celestial pole now because the earth rotates and because we are using a stationary tripod we have to calculate how long we can set our exposures for so that the stars don't trail in our images that's where the rule of 500 comes into play there are two values to calculate the rule of 500 as it pertains to your particular camera and your particular lens the first is called crop factor and basically it's a way of comparing the sensor size in your camera to that of a full frame sensor camera because i'm using a crop frame sensor camera my crop factor value is going to be greater than one in my case it's going to be 1.6 if you're not sure what yours is go ahead and google whatever model camera you're using plus crop factor and you should get the answer the second value is going to be the focal length of lens we're using in our case we're using a 300 millimeter telephoto lens so our second value is 300. we take the 1.6 from the crop factor we multiply it by the 300 and we get 480 we then take the 500 and divide it by the 480 and we get a little bit over one that's how many seconds we can set our exposures for so that the stars do not trail in our image so you don't have to be an einstein to apply this rule of 500 to your setup it's always a good baseline and can help you get imaging faster the next thing i'm going to do is change the iso to 6400 now i'm choosing 6400 because i'm actually shooting it at 5.6 so i'm going to opt for a noisier image because i'm capturing less photons now if i had the luxury of shooting at say f 2.8 i would back my iso down to 3200 because i'm capturing more photons it really depends on the setup you're using and you can play it by ear to figure out what's best the next thing i want to do is add a two second delay because i don't want my hand to be on the camera while the photo is exposing so i'll make sure i set two seconds give myself plenty of time and i'll be good to go i also want to make sure i choose a daylight white balance now chances are this will probably make your images lean to the warmer side and perhaps be a little bit orange but that's okay because we're going to fix things in post-processing and get nice true colors lastly make sure you shoot in raw and large jpeg and this is really important shooting in jpeg actually compresses the data which is a pretty scary thing so we're going to shoot in raw because these large files are actually going to be the ones that we're using for processing the large jpegs are going to be the ones that we reference when we're taking photos so to recap you're shooting a one second exposure at iso 6400 with a two second delay using daylight white balance and shooting in raw and large jpeg formats you also want to make sure that if you're shooting with a newer camera like the t7i to turn off any long exposure noise reduction finally after all that effort we can talk about shooting remember you're going to look the direction opposite of the hemisphere you're in to see orion orion's most easily identified by the three stars in orion's belt but we're actually interested in this star right here and that star actually isn't a star because that cheeky little speck is actually the orion nebula now before you go and get all excited stop we need to focus literally because this is critical the first part of focusing your camera is bringing orion into view with the lens zoomed all the way out it should look something like this we're going to use the star ride gel to focus because it's pretty bright go ahead and zoom all the way on rye gel and try to keep it centered as best as you can it should look like something like this then use the digital zoom to zoom in the entire way notice that it's out of focus so you're going to focus your camera all the way to infinity as we're doing this it goes into focus but then it goes out again it's almost focused but not quite so we actually have to slightly back off the focus of infinity until it looks something like this so ideally to get a good picture you need to have your stars in focus and they should look something like this with the smallest white dot in the center and purple fringing is okay it just means that you've got cheaper glass in your lens once you've achieved that focus zoom out the lens and re-center your camera on the orion nebula be careful not to touch the focus and make sure you take your time remember the orion nebula is right here so once you have that in the center of your camera go ahead and zoom the lens in all the way making sure that you keep it centered you can then use the digital zoom to zoom in the entire way and check it should look something like this so if you've reached this point here then you're good to go after that back out of the digital zoom and give it a shot and there it is your first deep space image and it's a beauty so go ahead get excited because you're gonna have to take 300 of these so go ahead and click and click and click away now if you don't feel like sitting there and click click click clicking the shutter of your camera 300 times you can get this nifty little device called an intervalometer i'll put a link in the description of the ones i use basically it's device that plugs into the side of your camera and it activates the shutter for you automatically now if you're using an intervalometer make sure you set the exposure to bulb and also make sure that you turn off the delay because the interferometer will take care of this for you using the intervalometer i can set things like the delay until the session begins the length of each exposure the delay between exposures as well as the number of exposures once i have all these fields set i can go ahead and press start and i'm off to the races one more thing see how the orion nebula is drifting out of frame because of the rotation of the earth you're going to have to re-center every 10 to 15 exposures to try to keep it in the center of frame as best as possible now before you head over to processing stop because we are not done with the camera yet we need that camera to take calibration frames which is the next part of this tutorial now unfortunately technology is not perfect and your camera and your lens are going to introduce their own noise into the final image but don't worry we have calibration frames and even the hubble space telescope uses these types of frames to get cleaner better images of the deep sky objects now noise and artifacts can come from any number of sources for instance consider the noise that can there we go the noise that can come from the sensor of your camera hot pixels can also create issues with your image and you can also get vignetting from the telescope or the lens and finally there can even be pieces of dust that get stuck on the sensor or in the lens of the camera so how do we address this well we take three types of calibration frames the first are called dark frames and they help us capture the thermal noise from the sensor next we can take what are called flat frames and these help us capture any vignetting or any dust that may be present finally we can take what are called bias frames and these help capture the sensor readout noise which is specific to each camera take these right after you take the photos and this is for two reasons you want the dark frames to be taken at the same temperature as the photos and you want to make sure you have the same focus for the calibration frames as you had for the photos now i shot these tutorial videos during the day but you want to shoot your calibration frames at night so light doesn't creep into your sensor let's begin first dark frames the first thing you do is put the lens cap of your camera back on then turn off the delay because we can have our hand on the camera when we shoot after that go ahead and shoot take 50 of these dark frames which are essentially the same settings as the photos just with the lens cap on next flat frames you're going to need a white t-shirt or white cloth a rubber band and a phone or tablet with a screen large enough to cover the lens of your camera first you're going to remove the lens cap from your camera next you'll change the mode from manual to aperture priority or av now that you've got your white t-shirt and your rubber band you're going to take the camera and point it as straight up as you can make sure that you've secured it in place and that it's not going to move then take the white t-shirt and place it over the lens being careful not to adjust the focus then stretch the rubber band over the lens and make sure the cloth is pulled tight you want a nice even field after that you're going to take out your cell phone and turn on a white background turn the brightness all the way up on that device take that device and then place it on top of the camera lens you're going to want to make sure that you cover the lens entirely with the phone screen because we want an evenly lit field in the live view of your camera it should look something like this with a histogram 50 exposed go ahead and take a shot as we'll see the flat frame did its job because we captured a dust mote as well as some vignetting in the corners go ahead and take 30 of these flat frames finally bias frames first you'll want to take off that white t-shirt wait no you know what i mean after the t-shirt's off replace the lens cap then set your camera back to manual mode and you're going to select the shortest exposure possible in my case it's one over four thousand once you have that set go ahead and shoot ideally you should take about 50 of these so to recap first you're going to take 50 dark frames with the same camera settings as the photos the lens cap on and shot in the same temperature then you're going to take 30 flat frames with the camera set to aperture priority and not changing any other settings make sure you use the t-shirt rubber band and phone or tablet to create an evenly lit field finally you're going to take 50 bias frames with the camera set back to manual mode set to the shortest exposure possible and with the lens cap on in total we should have 430 frames and we can bump this number up if we want to increase the quality of our image but i for one like my camera and i don't want to kill the shutter once you have all those footage on your sd card we're going to create folders for each set of photos and this is really important because it'll help us organize things later so go ahead and create a folder for the light frames the dark frames the flat frames and the bias frames now that we have our photos organized we can move on to stacking well stacking the photos that is in short stacking is a way of combining multiple images into one final photo that we can edit we use the stars in each photo as anchor points to align the photos properly stacking helps us get better images by averaging the photos noise which is fairly random across photos will be averaged out and the signal which is fairly consistent across photos will become clearer so by adding more photos to our final image we can reduce the noise and more importantly increase what is called the signal to noise ratio see astrophotography is all about data and at the end of the day you want to try to dump as many photos into that final image as possible this is going to get you better results so how do we do this deep sky stacker i'll put a link in the description so you can download this it helps us automate the stacking process and it's free when you open deep sky stacker it'll look like this to upload the light frames you go to the top left hand corner and select here now remember that we've already divided each of the frames into their own folders and this is what makes our life much easier go ahead and go to the light frames folder remember we're going to want to upload the raw files because it's the uncompressed data select the first photo scroll all the way down to the bottom hold down shift click the last one and then click open now even though we've brought all these into deep sky stacker we need to still select each of these boxes to the left of these so you can either go down manually and click one at a time or you can select the first one scroll all the way down to the bottom hold down shift select the bottom one and then right click and select check this will upload all of our 300 photos automatically but we still need to do the calibration frames so we'll do the same thing with the dark frames select dark frames open the folder select the first one scroll all the way down select all of them and then open notice with these however we don't need to do the boxes so we can go ahead and move on and do the same thing with the flat frames make sure they're all selected and then open finally we'll upload the bias frames at the last of our folders select the bias frames select all of them and then open so now that we've uploaded all of our light frames as well as all of our calibration frames we need to next register the pictures so select this button there's going to be a value in the center of this box and i'd change it to 95 this means that deep sky stacker will keep the best 95 percent of the photos then go to advanced and we're going to select the star detection threshold remember the stars are anchor points as these photos are being stacked in our case we've got about a hundred so that's pretty good we'll then go to recommended settings down here and select this and deep sky stacker does this great thing where it will select in red the things that it would recommend changing so click the blue underneath each of the red texts and this will give you a great out of box solution for selecting the best settings for stacking these images once those are all checked go ahead and click ok we're going back to the menu we were at before and we're going to click ok here again this will bring us to the menu just before we stack we've got all of our calibration frames as well as our light frames and the total amount of exposure time once you see the screen go ahead and click ok and we're off to the races now this could take a few hours depending on your computer so let's speed things up i'd recommend doing this maybe while you're at work or perhaps while you're at the gym or maybe my personal favorite just before you go to bed so that when you wake up it's ready to go once you're done stacking your image it won't be too impressive and it'll probably look something like this but don't worry we're not going to touch any of these adjustments down here because we're going to be doing all of our processing in photoshop which is where we move next to processing the best part of astrophotography like i said we're going to be using photoshop which is also free well a free 7 day trial at least once you have photoshop opened go ahead and open the autosave.tiff file that deepsky stacker has created again it's not too impressive and we actually need to change the bit mode so we can make adjustments go up to mode and select the 16-bit mode after you've done that go to the method and change this to exposure and gamma go ahead and click ok and now we can make adjustments in photoshop that we couldn't otherwise the next thing we need to do is crop the image and this is because black space can be difficult to process and can really skew the histogram of our image so go ahead and pull these edges in to right about there and do the same thing with the top and bottom as well once you're done click the check mark we're going to also rotate the image so we can see the detail closer after you've done this we can zoom in using the view or the control plus function the next thing we need to do is create a new layer from that which is visible you can do this by holding ctrl shift alt e on a windows computer this is a great rule of thumb to always protect your work and go back to an earlier version the next thing we want to do is bring out this nebulosity here so we'll adjust levels and you can do that by holding ctrl l we're going to pull this slider over here until it just meets the beginning and then we'll click ok we're going to hit ctrl l again and we're going to move these two sliders so that they're closer to this histogram so we'll bring this one in a little bit and then we'll bring the other one into just a little bit as well you don't want to do too much at a time so we're going to do this a few more times in a few more iterations to bring things in very carefully and slowly now you don't want to bring the slider too far in because you can clip the data so make sure it's on the edge of the histogram and not cutting it off [Music] let's go ahead and do this one more time so that we can make sure we get as much detail out of this nebula as possible now we've created this nasty green haze which we can fix by setting a neutral gray point hold ctrl l and then select the middle eyedropper find somewhere on the image where it'll be a black part of the sky and try to get it balanced that looks pretty good once you've done that you're going to hit ok and then again like a good person we're going to create a new layer from the visible once again making sure we're keeping track of our work now the next thing we're going to do is increase the vibrance and saturation of this photo so go ahead and take the saturation slider and bring it up and do the same thing with a vibrance slider as well don't do it too much but we do want to start to bring out some of this color after you've done that we're going to create two new layers from that which is visible one of these layers which we'll continue to edit and the other one which we'll use later take the bottom layer and name it something special that you remember go back to the top layer and this time we're going to adjust the curves to bring out more detail so hold down ctrl m and you'll have the histogram tool hold down control again and click the eyedropper somewhere where the nebula is more faint it'll plot that area on the histogram which will represent the values of the pixels you clicked go ahead and pull that up slightly and we'll begin to see more detail of the nebula come out then go to the other side of the histogram and pull that down this is called stretching the curves and it helps bring out detail in deep sky objects after you've done that go ahead and click ok it's actually looking pretty good and we can see a lot of outer nebulosity down here so like a good person create a new layer from that which is visible and the next thing we'll do is adjust the levels so hold ctrl l and when the histogram pops up move the slider to the right this will make the overall image a little bit darker and make a little bit more contrasty click ok and then the next thing we'll do is increase the vibrance and the saturation of the image once again so go ahead and take the saturation slider as well as the vibrance slider and bring them up slightly to increase this color [Music] and once again we're going to make sure we create a new layer from the visible to back up our workflow now notice we've got these nasty purple halos around these stars and there's a quick fix go to filter camera raw filter and then there's a window with a bunch of options that will pop up we want to make sure that we go down to the optics option and under that there will be a fringe tab we're going to take the slider on the purple spectrum and we're going to pull it over to about two or three and this will get rid of those nasty purple halos and bring out more of the natural reds and blues that are present now when we did that we still got this nasty green color so we're going to create a new layer from visible and once we've done that we're going to set a neutral gray point again click the middle eyedropper select somewhere on the image where it's good and nice and balanced and it looks pretty good so we'll click ok things are really coming along but we still can do a little bit more so we're going to once again adjust the curves to bring out some more nebulosity take the eyedropper click on a faint part of the nebula holding down the control button and then pull that part of the histogram up while bringing the left part of it down again we're bringing out more detail and things are looking pretty sharp and then we're going to do another levels adjust so hold down control l take the middle slider and pull it slightly to the right so we've got a darker sky but a perhaps sharper nebula now notice we've blown out the center of the nebula a little bit which is a little problematic so we're going to take that layer that we had saved earlier and slide it up until it's just underneath then click that top layer again go over to the eraser tool and we're going to make sure that we've got eraser settings set to about two percent hardness a small size and then a small percentage of opacity once we have this setting selected we're actually going to zoom in on the center part of the nebula which is called the trapezium and we're going to erase away the top layer this will reveal the layer underneath that is less blown out and will provide us with more detail in the final image you want to take a smaller lighter approach to this and you don't want to be too heavy-handed because you want to make the blending look natural and you want there to be a smooth transition between layers you can see that we're starting to actually reveal some of this detail and we're creating what's called a high dynamic range image this will create more detail in the final image and will give us a cooler view into the trapezium which is essentially the center of this star nursery 1300 light years away things are looking pretty good right now and i'm pretty happy with how this is coming out so we're going to zoom back out and that looks pretty good so we're going to create a new layer from that which is visible and there's this nasty reddish glow to this image so we're actually going to adjust the levels again and we're going to go to just the red channel we're going to take that slider and move it over just a hair so that it's more balanced of an image once you've done that go ahead and click ok [Music] now things are looking much better than they were before but there's still a lot of noise in this image so to reduce the noise in the image we're actually going to go up to filter noise and then reduce noise you can change these settings and adjust them to the ones that you think will be best i find that middle of the road tends to be a pretty good solution but again i'd recommend playing around with them to figure out what works for you best once you click ok you can begin to see that we have in fact reduced a decent amount of noise in the image after doing this what we're going to do is do one more curves adjustment so control m and then we're going to once again control click on a faint part of the nebula and pull that up just slightly and then go to the bottom part of the histogram and pull that down just slightly you don't want to do too much and again you don't want to blow out the center because we've already fixed that but do it just subtly and we're going to once again increase the saturation just ever so slightly to give it that final punch and you're all done you've successfully captured m42 or the orion nebula m43 as well as a part of the running man nebula which is pretty awesome so you've made it the entire way through this video and you've earned your ticket to join the astrophotography hype train the question is will you [Music] thank you so much again for taking the time to watch this entire video i really appreciate it and i hope you learned a little bit more about this crazy hobby we call astrophotography i'm going to be doing more start to finish videos like this where i show you how to use simple camera gear like the nifty 50 lens that's a teaser to take these photos of space i'm also working on a few other shorter videos all things astrophotography including astrophotography tips as well as some of the stories behind the images i've taken i hope you grow to appreciate this hobby and god's creation as much as i do and i hope you stay tuned for those videos so again thanks for watching until next time keep your head up clear skies are on the way [Music]

Channel: The Heavens Declare

Views: 4,203

Keywords: Astrophotography, DSLR, Space, tripod, tutorial, Orion nebula, space photos, astro photo, the heavens declare, heavens declare, kit lens, canon rebel t6, telephoto lens, astrophotos, astro, Deep Sky Stacker, Photoshop, photo processing, deep sky objects, nebula

Id: bDqrW8cLEx8

Length: 28min 37sec (1717 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021