Sun Photography with Smart Telescopes | Astrophotography for Beginners

this is our sun and these are smart telescopes and this is me making a video about how you can photograph one of those things with the other and my hope is that by the end of this you'll know which is which I'll walk you through how to photograph the sun's ever evolving sunspots we'll also be going over how to photograph solar transits of aircrafts satellites and space stations but it won't just be me guiding you on this journey stick around to the end because we have a very special guest joining us niik Carver from nebula photos I'm Sarah and as always grab a snack and let's jump into [Music] it all righty all you Sun lovers out there before we get started as always I must stress the importance of solar safety please never look up at the sun with the naked eye please use certified solar glasses and please never look through a telescope or binoculars or anything like that with your eyes without a solar filter attached or the correct solar equipment and please never point your telescope with a camera or your camera lens up at the sun without a solar filter attached because you will absolutely obliterate your camera sensor as well going blind yourself and blinding your device will also make everyone sad now I'm not sure how many of you know this but there is another source of light that shines very brightly and that light is the gratitude that radiates from my heart for all of my amazing subscribers and lovely patrons thank you for all of your ongoing support and if you would like to support this Channel please consider becoming a subscriber and consider becoming a patron over on my patreon page I do share image files over there for you to process as well as adree content again thank you so much for all of your ongoing support I couldn't do it without you guys our son is just one of the billions of trillions of stars out there in the universe and it's also the only star out of all of them that we can actually observe it's ever evolving Photosphere or its surface in detail to observe an image our sun you don't need a super high-end Observatory or expensive telescope setup to do this the sear s50 the dwarf 2 and other products from companies such as vonas are all examples of smart telescopes that with the addition of their solar filters you can safely image sunspots solar transits and solar eclipses and you can also use them for nighttime photography to image things like the moon and deep space objects like galaxies and nebula as well as do daytime photography of things like birds which have been really popular with these devices this can all be done for around $500 or even less with something like the Hestia so here's the rundown I'm going to start with the sear s50 and go through each different type of solar photography sunspots and then solar transits and then I'll do the same thing for the dwarf 2 and then throughout the whole process I'll be calling out notable differences between the two devices and call out really cool sunf facts and anything else that might be of interest to you all so here we have the sear 50 from zwo it's an all-in-one software controll telescope that includes everything you'd need for solar Imaging compared to the dwarf 2 it does have a longer focal length which can be a good thing depending on what you're wanting to do with it but let's dive into the use cases and you can be the judge for yourself the first subject that we're going to cover are spots but before we do that let's have a word from our moderate to severe Sunspot expert Sarah thanks Sarah I'm here to give us a brief overview of sunspots so the sun isn't solid it's a giant sphere of extremely hot gas and it also spins but not at the same rate everywhere the rotation period at the equator is faster than near the poles this differential rotation causes the sun's magnetic field to get wound up and stretched sometimes intersecting the surface when that happens it inhibits convection or the rising of hotter gases to the surface and the result is cooler temperatures at the intersection in the form of dark regions or sunspots back over to you Sarah thanks Sarah so where were we ah yes Imaging sunspots with the sea star there is usually a time of day for your specific location where Imaging the sun is best and by best I mean when the images or videos you take will yield the clearest and crispest results Imaging the Sun or any Celestial body from down here on Earth means that our telescope must image through air and other particulates in the local sky in the greater atmosphere above all of which impact the quality of our images so there are two values that we want to take into consideration to determine the quality of the sky transparency and seeing transparency is the opacity of the atmosphere or how clear is and things like moisture humidity all lower the transparency as does smoke or other kinds of pollution now seeing on the other hand basically refers to how stable the atmosphere is both locally which means around you as well as the higher parts of the atmosphere the more turbulent the atmosphere around us and above us the worse off our images will be and the opposite is true where the steadier the atmosphere the better and more clear and in focus our images will be you can use different apps like astrosphere you're in North America to see the seeing conditions and the transparency conditions as you can see here it's rated from excellent and poor for transparency as well as seeing conditions seeing is often the real limiting factor in our images you can only do so much sharpening in post-processing before things really start to look pretty bad so you really want to make sure that you are Imaging with good seeing conditions since the sun's activity is always changing if you want to see what's going on with the sun ahead of time you can check out space sli.com on your desktop or download the app to your mobile device and it will show you current active regions on the sun and other solar related activity which is really fascinating you can also enable notifications so that if there is a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection it will notify you as well as the KP index or solar activity that is related to the Aurora now let's head out so we have our sear charged up and ready to go it does come with some nice tripod legs and it also comes with a solar filter and in terms of a location to set up make sure the sun will be in view which I think it goes without saying grass is a great option as is packed down dirt next you want to make sure your SE star setup is level to ensure accurate and consistent tracking of the Sun so you kind of have two setup options here option one you could level the tripod legs first before adding the sear to the top of them since there is a physical bubble leveler here on the top of the tripod legs or option two you could add the tripod legs to the Bottom of the Sea Star first and then once in the app if the sear isn't leveled enough the app will prompt you to level the tripod legs with the aid of its built-in digital leveler now another thing to note be sure that you Orient the lens of the sear away from the Sun so that when you add the solar filter to it later you don't damage the sear accidentally now that we have the sear and the tripod ready to go let's go ahead and turn it on next let's launch the sear mobile app on my smartphone so we can start interfacing with it so so let's first connect to the sear by pressing the connect button here you can see the name of my sear here as it emits its own Wi-Fi signal so I'm going to press connect and it's now connecting it's going to ask me to join my SE star Wi-Fi network and I'm going to select join all right we are connected and in business so as you can see we have the power level here it's at 95% the sear has a 6-hour battery life and uses a USBC cable to charge now in terms of the actual temperature the sear be mindful of its operating temperature limit now in terms of storage we have quite a bit here the sear comes with 64 GB of internal storage But be sure you have plenty for your specific Imaging session all right now let's go over here to the Focus window I'm going to enable the manual focus option even though the sear has a nice autofocus feature now back to the home screen we also have a variety of different Imaging modes as I mentioned earlier on in this video but for this video we of course want the solar mode so let's go ahead and select it and we are greeted with a very lovely message and reminder to install the solar filter the solar filter isn't built in so it must be physically mounted to the front of the sea star this is a white light solar filter which is great for Imaging sunspots and other phenomena on the Photosphere which again is the visible surface of the Sun or what we see when we think of the Sun as this glowing white ball in space all right so let's go ahead and use the arrows to move the SE star lens up and let's go ahead and add the solar filter to it and in the app we can tell it that the filter is on and we are good to go so it can go to the Sun the ability to locate the sun automatically is a huge win in my opinion for the SE star it will automatically move both axes of the sea Star the altitude and aouth axes to do so now let's say that the sear has trouble locating and centering up on the Sun so it fails in its go-to function you may need to recal calibrate the compass of the SE Star by going into the settings and following the compass calibration prompt SL instructions here it's very easy to do and just takes a few moments to do now if it still can't find the sun you can locate it manually I find that it's most helpful to align the center slit of the sear here until the sun is shining straight through so you at least have a good starting point but then within the app just use the touch control buttons to move slash slew the alt as Mount right and left and up and down until the sun is in the the frame then once it is in the frame you can enable Target correction to reenter it and to keep the sun centered otherwise if the SE star has no issue finding the sun like in our case in this video once it has located the sun it's going to ask you to confirm that the sun is centered in the frame and then it's going to ask you to enable Target correction which will move the sun back to the center of the field of view if it starts to drift too far from the center now if you want to digitally zoom in within the app you can also do that either by using the standard 1X 2X or 4X Zoom views or by pinching the screen so in terms of solar Imaging modes we have three different ways to capture the sun we have photo video and time lapse for Imaging sense spots let's start with photo mode with photo mode you can take a single image or a series of images consecutively but you'd have to do this manually now you might be wondering why you'd want to take a series of images consecutively the reason you would want to do this is because you would either want to use one of the images that had the seing conditions where everything was the most in focus and everything was the clearest or you'd want to take all of those individual frames and kind of see which ones had the best seing conditions and then put those together so that you could see a final stacked image that had more detail on sunspots and other solar features something to note though the image files themselves are taken and saved as jpegs now let's talk about Focus as mentioned there are two ways to focus in the sear you can autofocus and you can also manually focus it's always best to focus on something with a good deal of contrast if you don't have any sunspots you can always use the edge of the Sun as well that shake is due to the fact that it is a little bit windy so I'm going to tap on this area where I want to focus and you're going to see this box appear and then over on the right hand corner here at the bottom there is a button with AF click that to autofocus and the Box will turn green as it begins to focus all right and it's finished now in terms of manual focus on the Le hand side here we did enable this feature when we first launched the app if you remember but basically what we have here are four buttons which let you move up or down slower or faster along the focus steps of the SE Stars focuser the steps refer to the focus placement now let's talk about exposure settings so there are two approaches you could take you could do full auto in which the sear will adjust the brightness according to the field of view it does a pretty good job with this on its own or you could select from the wheel to make it brighter or dimmer you could also select manual settings you could select the gain or basically the iso equivalent if you're familiar with the DSLR or mirrorless camera as well as the shutter speed I generally keep it at the default of exposure settings where the solar limb or the edge of the sun is slightly darker than the center if you have something like this it does mean that the sun is properly exposed but feel free to experiment if you would like but once we do have everything in Focus we can go ahead and take an image by pressing the button here and if you press down here on the bottom left hand corner you can access your album now going back to why I take multiple photos when Imaging the sun surface uh now taking multiple photos is really nice because we can use a thirdparty stacking software to stack all those images together or the images with the best seeing conditions and what it's going to do is it's going to give us more signal to noise or more SNR which gives us more opportunity to see what's actually on the sun in more clarity and more detail uh than you would otherwise see with a single photo the dwarf 2 actually has a feature within the mobile app that will stack the photos for you together but while the sear doesn't have this feature for photos it does have it for time-lapses in videos I mean after all a video is just a bunch of images taken very quickly one after the other so let's switch over to timelapse mode now the sear has quite a few different options for time-lapses you can take a time lapse where it takes a single photo every second for however long you want likewise you could do a time lapse where it takes an image every 2 seconds 5 Seconds so on and so forth all the way up to 60 seconds you'll just need to calculate how long of a video you would want based on those parameters and you can of course change the exposure settings as I showed you before and you can choose what file format the final video will be taken and stored as it could either be a compressed MP4 or an Avi raw video file Avi is just a type of raw video file which is nice because you can take an avi file and use it in popular third party software to stack later on if you want to go that route now I'll show you how the stacking feature works for time- lapses and videos after I go over the video modes but just like with time-lapses video files can either be taken and stored as MP4s or Avi raw files personally for sunspots I would take raw so that I can stack the individual frames of the video within the app I've taken a video here and now we are going to stack the individual frames of the video into a single final stacked image next let's access our album by tapping on the my album icon here we want to go into the sear album for this not the downloaded sub album and we will need to go under the solar folder next we will need to select one of our raw time-lapse videos or Raw videos all Raw videos of any kind time-lapse or regular video will have the word Raw overlayed on its thumbnail and all raw time laps videos will have this little clock icon on them and the raw regular videos won't so I'm going to select this raw video here Raw videos from the sear will all be 11 frames per second um the frame rate is slower than for non-raw videos or compressed MP4 files which are 30 frames per second but anytime the SE star takes a raw video it will simultaneously store a MP4 version that can be accessed via the my Works folder when the Sear is connected to your computer next on the top right hand corner let's tap on the stack button here and then the video stacking screen will appear and the app will begin stacking the videos frames and voila it's magically done as a result so let's take a look at the image by tapping the button here and let's apply some post processing to it from the sear app so let's tap on edit on the top right hand corner we have the ability to adjust the exposure value so basically we can brighten or darken the entire image we can brighten it by using this little slider here and bringing it to the right and we can darken it by sliding it to the left we can also reset the exposure value to the default value at any time by pressing reset next we have the real big Powerhouse here sharpen and it looks like the default value is set to 10 already so a bit of sharpening is applied to the image after it's created now let's increase the sharpness to 50 tons of great detail from the little scope is possible now let's talk about solar transits for this example we're going to be learning how to capture the ISS transiting the Sun but the principles will apply to the Chinese space station and the Hub Space Telescope and mostly any other low Earth orbiting satellites so planning is Numero Uno on our list because Imaging these transits is highly dependent on when and where you are on earth yes the ISS does travel very fast and does Transit the sun on often but due to the fact that the ISS is fairly close to the Earth it's only visible from narrow paths along the ground so step one we need to see when the next ISS solar Transit will be for a given location or location range let's look at Transit finder.com this is an excellent website that has proven to be a very reliable resource that can tell us when both solar and lunar transits of the largest artificial satellites will occur and by that I mean the ISS the CSS and the Hub Space Telescope but we first need to set up our calculation by inputting some values number one we need to put in our location as the Observer Slimer for the geographic coordinates we will need to add our latitude and longitude coordinates in decimal form positive for the northern and Eastern hemispheres there are several ways to find out what your latitude and longitude coordinates are for your geographic location you can use what ismy elevation.com type in your physical location address here and it will convert it for you in decimal form or you can select your location from the map overlay otherwise you can also follow the same steps using Google Maps or different types of applications so let's input those values back on Transit finder.com next you'll need to identify your geographic location elevation in meters you can find that out at the same website as well but I know there are others out there since Transit finder.com requests that the value be in meters be sure to toggle this to m meters and then use that value for your elevation oh and you could also use autod detect or select your location from the map here but sometimes I feel like these aren't as accurate at least for me next we need to determine the time space or the range of time we want to see a Transit Transit finder.com allows us to see dates 10 days into the past and 30 days into the future my recommendation is to check this site once a week to see what the upcoming transits will be a month into the future but also you you will need to recheck it a few days before a selected transit to ensure that the trajectory of the ISS hasn't changed which sometimes it does in which case Transit finder.com will be updated accordingly next we have the travel distance there is a maximum distance from the selected coordinates to the center line of the transit's visibility path so basically how far are you willing to travel to see the ISS Transit across the Sun or the Moon from your initial location with the range allowed being from 1 to 240 km but it's up to you in terms of how far you're willing to travel I'll talk more about the transit's visibility path and the center line shortly next you can choose to include Transit predictions for the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chinese space station but when left uncheck the calculations are only going to be done for the International Space Station so once we've entered in our initial values we can tell the site to calculate and it will provide a list of Transit predictions based on that information we just provided if no result s occur then that means no transits or close passes are occurring within the specified dates and location so you will need to expand your selection but in this case we have a list many of the transits that are listed will be far too small for any details of the ISS to be seen that's especially true for our smaller telescopes but that's okay we can maximize what details we can see by choosing a Transit where the angular size of the ISS is well over 50° by angular size I mean how large the ISS will appear to The Observer from Earth and it's measured in Arc seconds or 1 3,600 of a degree so if I scroll down we have several results the next criteria that I'm going to consider is time of day this one right here is occurring a little bit later on in the day than I would want since the sun will have been out for a while and will have warmed things up a little bit more than I want and it will also be closer to the Horizon than this one down here I really like this one right here and the angular size is really nice and it will occur a little after 12:00 p.m. noon where the sun will be highest in the sky which means there will be less atmosphere to image through however from this image as with all of the other images that appeared for our search results the ISS won't be transiting the Sun for any of them but rather will be doing a quote unquote close pass from our initial location which means we will need to find a location where we can actually see the ISS Transit the solar disc and we can do that fairly easily for this selection so first take a look at this number here for center line distance this basically means that from our initial locations coordinates we would need to travel a minimum distance of of 1261 km to see the ISS Transit directly across the center of the solar disc since I was like yeah I'll travel at least 240 kilometers when I input my range value that's cool with me next I'm going to click on the show on map button for this result so for context the green location pin is our starting location or what we input into Transit finder initially and the green dotted circle surrounding everything is our location range that we input which again was 240 km so if we zoom in you'll notice that there is this lighter red path this red path from one side to the other is quite slim it's only about 5 km and so you will need to observe from here to even see it Transit the sun's disc at all just beyond the red area equals a close pass not a Transit which we don't want now within the red area right in the middle we have this dotted Center Red Line and anywhere on this red dotted line is where you really want to be Imaging from hence the blue location pin which is the closest point from our initial location the green pin to where we would need to travel to to see the ISS Transit the sun directly across the center of the solar disc the closer you are on that Center dotted line the closer the ISS will Transit across the center of the solar disc now conversely the further you get away from the center dotted line on this map the further away the ISS will be from the center of the dis the reason why you would want to travel to a location where you can see the ISS Transit across the center of the solar disc or even lunar disk is because the ISS travels very quickly we're talking one or two seconds at times but most likely if it's a good Transit and by that I mean where the transit will appear rather large to us then the transit length will be millisecs which is why we will also be using video to capture it which means for a given Transit if we want to maximize our chances of getting the ISS in at least one frame of our video we will have the highest chance of doing this if we have a longer Transit so for a given Transit the further from the center of the disc the shorter the transit will be and thus the shorter the transit window conversely for that same Transit the closer the ISS transits the center of the disc the longer the transit which again would result in a longer Transit window for you which translates to more video frames that you can capture in your video you'll have more chances of getting a clear shot of the ISS from those frames since turbulence in the atmosphere is always changing so the more shots you get the higher likelihood that you'll at least get one frame where the ISS was fairly clear and in focus and it also means that for those of you who want to make a composite of those video frames where the ISS transits across the Sun like this that there will be a longer cord of ISS images to composite together into a single image but basically as long as you are within this red area you will at least see it Transit the Sun but I highly recommend finding a location like a public park or even a parking lot if necessary that is located on the center dotted line to get the longest Transit possible then once you found an exact location on the center dotted line that you can image from and are willing to travel to go ahead and get the latitude and longitude for it in decimal form of course as well as the elevation in meters and re-enter those values into Transit finder.com to confirm the transit which it should still appear as one of the results but we'll now have maroon text and we'll have slightly updated values cool so we've identified the best upcoming transit for us we know the time and date it's going to occur we've identified where it will be and we've also found an Imaging spot on the center line where we can do our capturing session now step two in our preparation is to practice and prepare which should occur anywhere between 1 to two weeks out or even a month out from the transit I recommend taking time to practice setting up your sear or dwarf 2 and getting really comfortable with leveling and connecting to the device and then practice autofocusing and manual focusing as well as capturing videos and for video we're going to want to take Raw videos because single images and even 1 second interval time-lapse videos are way too slow for an ISS Transit so the more frames that we can collect the better as mentioned a regular raw video will be 11 frames per second but the data won't be compressed so you can process that data more later on however if you want and even if you don't have plans to process the data afterwards you can offload the faster. mpp4 video that the sear also creates during the raw video capture which will be 30 frames per second which means you will have more frames with the ISS as as a result for exposure settings they will be the same for sunspots so keep everything at the default in Auto you'll also want to upgrade your firmware and software ahead of time so there are no surprises like bugs in the software the day of step three check weather a week out for your Imaging location and step four point1 check to see if the transit pass has changed two to 3 days out I mentioned earlier that sometimes the iss's trajectory will change and in any case it's important to check transit finder.com for any updates to the transit also take a screenshot or photo of the time and date to be accessible on your mobile device for day of to reference step 4.2 check weather and cloud coverage again one or 3 days out check multiple different applications or websites for your weather and cloud coverage as well as seeing conditions step five day before Transit next you're going to want to prepare and pack your equipment you'll want to have your sear fully charged so begin charging it make sure you have enough storage space on your Sear for your raw video also be sure that your smart device is fully charged you're going to want to download another app called atomic clock app to your smart device or a some sort of atomic clock app because in order to capture the ISS exactly at the right time you're going to need an app that uses the same clock that the ISS uses which is the atomic clock and so now that you have the CSR charged and your mobile device all charged up with enough storage space go ahead and pack everything up and put everything into your car that you're going to have to to travel with step number six day of Transit plan to arrive at your Imaging location at least 1 hour before Transit time you'll need time to set up your sea star and have it acclimate to the ambient temperature which will be especially true if it's going from a very warm location like it being stored in your house or car beforehand to going outside if it's colder you want the sea star to acclimate so that your images are clearer from your local seeing if the sea star and the outside ambient temperature are about the same then it's less of a concern but it's still something to consider and I would probably wait to set up the sea star a little bit so it doesn't warm up too much before the transit window next about 30 minutes before the transit go ahead and set your SE star up follow all the steps for setting up that we did during the Sunspot portion of this video and once everything is set up the solar filter is on you're connected perform a go-to to the Sun and then once the sun is centered ensure that it remains centered and enable Target correction you do want to plan for some time in your setup just in case the go-to fails which would mean you either need to recalibrate your sear and or you need to manually locate the sun with the virtual joystick on screen within the app but once everything is good to go the sun is centered Target correction is enabled go ahead and do an autofocus over a sunspot or on the limb of the sun if autofocus isn't working well go ahead and use manual focus to dial things in for exposure settings keep everything at the auto default settings so as to expose as if we were Imaging sunspots as mentioned before go ahead and focus again to get things really dialed in then go to video and select raw and capture a test video and just make sure it saves to the sear you can delete that if you want 5 minutes before make sure your atomic clock app is open and refocus the sear be sure to be checking the time as well 3 minutes before in the sear app make sure everything is still in Focus expand the view to full screen begin a screen recording on your smart device if you can so that you have a backup view as well 1 minute before Transit and then within the sear app begin the raw video capture a minute before the transit is actually set to begin and don't stop the video until at least a minute after the transit is supposed to end that way you can ensure you got it moments before during and moments after the transit be sure to be as still as possible and avoid walking around or bumping the sea star to avoid vibration in the frames this also applies to the dwarf once a minute or more has passed from checking your atomic clock app you can go ahead and stop your screen recording if you started one on your mobile device and then go ahead and stop your video on the sear next go to my album sear and the raw video should be there feel free to watch it back to see if you got it and give yourself a pad on the back a lot went into capturing this Transit now when I tried to capture an ISS solar Transit with the sear my first attempt came out subpar mostly because I selected a Transit that was far too small and the transit also occurred lower on the horizon at about 2:00 p.m. in the winter and the SE star wasn't well in Focus so a very special thank you to saspa for letting me share and use his video footage of his sear capturing the ISS Transit the sun I do apologize if I mispronounced your name but yeah thank you so much you did awesome so let this just be a reminder that every time you try something new it's okay if you didn't get the perfect results the first time or the second time uh what counts is that you tried and that you learned a lot along the way which will help you with future Pursuits not only with the next ISS solar Transit that you attempt but also with so many other things so just don't give up now let's move into the dwarf 2 and capturing sunspots with it and other types of solar transits so here we are with the dwarf 2 smart telescope it's a very Compact and lightweight device that can be controlled with a smartphone or tablet and can be used to image different celestial objects quite easily you can also use it for Imaging Wildlife subjects or sporting events during the day as it has object detection and tracking that can be enabled but one of the main differences of the dwarf 2 compared to the sear is that the dwarf 2 has two lenses a wide angle lens for wide filled shots and a telephoto lens for more zoomed in imaging now let's get the dwarf 2 set up for Imaging sunspots again make sure you pick a day and a time of day where the weather and seeing conditions are favorable to ensure clear and steady images also if you want to check out the sun's activity ahead of time check spaceweatherlive decom you can also check out the national solar observatories website as well to view activity on the sun now just like with the sea star we want to image at a location that is fairly level to ensure good tracking of the sun again ideal platforms are grass and packed down dirt now before you go outside you can add the solar filters to the dwarf ahead of time the solar filters will allow us to image the sun's visible surface the Photosphere just like with the SE star and then you would want to make sure of course that everything is level as possible for accurate tracking once the solar filters are on go ahead and turn it on by pressing the button here so now let's launch the accompanying app to my smartphone the app is called dwarf lab and it can be found in the App Store and the Google Play Store so here on the home screen the first thing that we need to do is pair and connect everything up by pressing on the connect button here so once connected we are on the expanded home screen view now on the home screen you can see that it has almost a full charge at 92% it uses rechargeable and swappable batteries but you can also leave it plugged in and charging with the battery while in use via a USBC down here on the port here so within the app there are several Imaging modes we can choose from the default is going to be set to photo mode where you just take a single image now let's scroll down to the bottom of the list so we have time-lapse Imaging mode and above that we have a burst mode for taking multiple shots quickly and then above that we have a pan mode for panoramic Imaging and then above that we have an astro mode where we can take raw images and stack them together this is similar to what we saw and what we did with the SE Stars raw video stacking feature and then we also have a video mode so for sunspots we're going to be trying out all these Imaging modes minus panel mode so first we need to get the sun centered up in our field of view and then we need to get the dwarf 2 tracking it to locate the sun we need to do this manually this of course uh is different than what we did with the sea star where the sea star has built in go-to for finding the sun automatically so for the dwarf 2 though we're going to be using the live view of both the wide angle and telephoto lenses that can be swapped between over here on the left hand side we will use the wide angle view first to get a wider field of view of the sky since it has a focal length of 48 mm compared to the telephoto lenses effective focal length of 675 mm or 100 mm natively to control the device as mentioned before you can manually move the altitude and asouth axes with your hands or you can use the apps built-in virtual joystick controller here so let's press on the arrows to begin locating the Sun but once in the telephoto view as indicated by the window at the top left and also by this smaller box in this the center of the wide angle view here we can switch to the telephoto view by tapping on the telephoto View at the left and then we can finish centering the Sun and if we need to adjust the speed of the joystick movements we can do that here by moving this up to make them faster or moving it down to make it slower sweet so the sun is pretty centered up under the function button here we have feature and we just need to select the track Sun option and this popup window with instructions will appear this basically tells you step by step how to ensure accurate tracking how to protect your device by using solar filters how to find the Sun and also some recommended exposure settings now press confirm and you may see the sun move a little bit that's the device getting it centered in the frame to track it accurately on the note about exposure settings let's dial those in for the telephoto lens again under function but instead of feature indicated by the Box icon we want to select the one below that with the three little lines in circles make sure that tell here is selected indicated by the line underneath and in white and over here to the right make sure in the drop down we have exposure selected for shutter or shutter speed then let's try one two hundreds of a second and then for gain let's set it to zero next let's go under tone which is the second word listed here in the drop- down menu and we have a variety of different tone settings we can enable or adjust the first is white balance the default is set to Auto but if we tap on white balance or the WB icon we have a subset of different white balance options in addition to your white balance we can control the brightness the Hue the saturation and we can also sharpen the image and adjust the quality of the image now let's focus the device and let's first zoom into the view by pinching the screen and spreading our fingers out we have a couple of sunspots here which is perfect for focusing on since they give us a good deal of contrast now to focus let's tap on the FOC icon here the dwarf 2 has a built-in autof focuser which works pretty well but we can also manually focus the device by using the plus and minus buttons here I'll show you the autofocus feature for this video but sometimes you may want to use the manual focus buttons to dial things in just like you would with the SE star while it's focusing the auto button will turn green but once it's finished it will go back to white but once we have the focus dialed in to the best of our ability and the exposure settings are good let's take a couple of images to test by tapping on the large white button here I like to take several so I can choose the ones with the best seeing SL Focus just like with the SE star the images will be stored under your album and they will be stored as jpegs so they will be compressed image files similar to the SE Stars photo mode okay next let's try out time-lapse mode with time-lapse we will be creating a time-lapse video similar to what we did with the sear so with the time-lapse Imaging mode you can enable solar tracking under the function button here and then once the sun is being ract under the feature section here you can select your settings by tapping on the clock icon and it will show you buttons to control the interval or the time between each shot that you want and then you'll also have the option to change the shooting duration so basically how long do you want to be Imaging for a really cool feature about the dwarf 2's time-lapse mode is that it will actually calculate the final film or final video duration for you as you move the values for Interval and shooting duration so you know how long your final video will be the final video will be a compressed video file that you can access now for a smoother video where the sun doesn't appear to move as much you'll want to use a shorter interval value just as a hot tip if that does matter to you but you can always try to stabilize the video in third party software on your desktop later on next you can adjust your exposure settings and you can adjust the tone settings and then just make sure you focus everything up with the focus button here again autofocus is an option or you can manual Focus as well and then you can start the time lapse and you can see how much time has elapsed in the red box here at the top and then the box to the right indicates how long the time-lapse video is currently you may want to refocus every once in a while during an interval if you have time and then the time-lapse can also be stopped the same way we started it by tapping on the big red button here the video will be accessible via the album and can also be downloaded to your computer next we have burst Imaging mode this basically allows you to take multiple photos very quickly simultaneously which is nice for attempting to beat the atmosphere and taking multiple photos and you know kind of sifting through them to see which ones are best same as before make sure the sun is being tracked and you can do that by selecting the function button and then under feature track Sun as before and you should be good to go and then under C here this allows you to select how many images you want to have taken during a single burst the minimum is three and the maximum is 999 depending on how hot it is outside and how many images you want select which is best for you you also have the same options for exposure and tone settings and then also be sure to focus now you can start your burst session with the white button here and on the bottom here in the middle it will show you the number of burst images we want which is 124 and then next to that we have a dynamic number for current images that have been taken so far and then the Burst Mode will just keep going until it reaches the set number of 124 and then the images will be stored to the album next we are going to take a video very similar concept as all the other Imaging modes the pros of taking a video of course is that it will take multiple frames very quickly which can help with getting good shots of the sun where the atmosphere was more stable and the focus was good however for video mode with the dwarf 2 the videos can only be taken and stored as a compressed video format which is totally fine especially if you just wanted to watch watch the video on your smart device or share it with others via text message or if you don't really want to work with the data later on in third party software on a computer not that you can't with a compressed video file but it's less ideal than working with raw file types since the data has already been compressed and you can't adjust white balance or dynamic range values as much just to kind of name a few reasons not having the option to take in store a raw video is a notable difference between the dwarf 2 and the sear since we can take both compressed and Raw videos at the same time with the sear so moving right along again make sure we are tracking the Sun and it's all centered up by going to function and then feature track Sun now let's adjust our exposure and tone settings and then of course Focus you can either manually focus or you can apply autofocus or do both and then once focus is good you can start the video capture by pressing the big red button here on the right and then you'll see how long the video has elapsed for with the red box here and then to end the video tap on the red button again and then the video will be stored to your album now for sunspots with the dwarf I recommend using the built-in solar Imaging stacking feature under the Astro mode traditionally this Imaging mode is used for celestial objects at night but what's cool about Astro mode for the sun is that we can use raw images and take them and then in the app it's going to register or align the good frames and stack them together to create a final image that has more detail than a single image would because it has more signal or light but basically the dwarf 2's AST mode stacking feature for Rob images is similar to the SE Stars raw video stacking feature but again this is for raw images not raw videos all right before we begin with Astro mode we need to start out either in photo video or any of the other Imaging modes to get the solar tracking going since Astro mode doesn't have this ability under its function button and the dwarf 2 can't go to the Sun during the day like it can with celestial object object at night since stars are visible at night so it can use those to Plate solve and do alignments too so let's start off in photo mode we have the telephoto live view going and then once the sun is centered up let's begin tracking the Sun as normal and once it has started to track the Sun as indicated here let's switch over to Astro mode in the app and switching between the different Imaging modes shouldn't affect the tracking of the Sun by the way now under function and then feature we have settings here this will allow us to select the image file format we want so we can choose between fits and tiffs fits is a type of raw file format that stores data in a table format and is popular in the field of astronomy again both raw file formats which gives us more range to process the data later next we have count and count refers to how many images we want to have taken the max number is 999 so I'm going to select 200 for this demo next we have the type of preview to display on screen in the Live View mode while the session is going this is where electronically assisted astronomy really shines for this device since we can actually see a single image appear on screen right after it's taken or we can view the Stacked image file in real time as more and more images are being aligned and stacked together to reveal more details I'll select the Stacked image so we can see the image stacking process in real time and then for biding keep it at 4K which just means we are keeping the default telephoto resolution and then before you start your Astro Imaging session be sure to adjust the exposure settings to your liking a note about the white balance though and other tone settings all of those will be overridden to the default values for the purpose of stacking so I wouldn't bother adjusting any of those tone settings for Astro mode just do exposure settings like gain and shutter speed so let's focus by selecting the focus icon here Select Auto for autofocus or again manually focus with the plus minus buttons and so now with everything dialed in we can begin the session by tapping on the red button and and on the home screen view we can see how many images have been taken and how many have been stacked into the final image view we see here as time goes on as it tends to do we will see more details and features of the solar surface appear let's move into solar transits so if you're just joining us now regarding solar transits I highly recommend checking out the solar Transit portion that we covered for the sea star in this video but basically we were able to capture ISS solar transits and we can follow and apply the same principles with the dwarf 2 all the way from planning to Preparing and to day of best practices so let's talk about how we can capture solar transits of other targets capturing solar transits of airplanes and birds won't be as straightforward as it was with the ISS and the CSS or the Hubble Space Telescope since we aren't going to be using Transit finder.com so obviously unless we created a mechanical bird that we can control via remote we will need to rely on some good fortune and good planning I recommend scouting a location where birds are abundant at a particular time of year Regions near the coast and breeding grounds tend to have lots of birds of course so what you could do is find a potential location via research or in-person observations you could identify what types of birds are usually there and you could also learn a bit more about their behaviors and when they tend to be most active to try and plan your shot around that along with ensuring you have good seing conditions and good weather so at the Imaging location which would be near the area where the birds tend to be uh but not too close you can set up your dwarf 2 or sear level everything get everything connected to your smart device and then you could use the wide angle lens of the dwarf 2 to get the birds in frame and observe them and then put the solar filters on and then get the sun in the wide angle View and then switch to telephoto View and adjust your focus and exposure settings to your liking then I would say try one 1 second interval time lapse or try recording a video and just let it run for a while but be sure you have plenty of available storage of course and your batteries are charged again there's not a definitive science to this just enjoy your time out in nature with what remains of our dinosaur friends AKA Birds now for capturing airplane solar transits there's still never a 100% guarantee that you'll get the shot but you can increase your odds by doing a bit of due diligence and practice so this section again will not be as technical as the ISS solar Transit section but will be I guess a little bit more technical than the bird Transit section but if you become more aware of flight patterns at your Imaging location day after day and you have a familiarity of where planes are relative to the Sun and its altitude you can kind of start to get an idea of when a plane May Transit the Sun for your next shot you can also use apps and websites like Flight Radar 24 to monitor live air traffic for the location you will likely be Imaging at then you'll be able to see in real time airplanes that are headed in the direction of the sun near your Imaging location if you know the sun's altitude and are aware of the angle you're shooting the Sun from and have a good idea that a plane May Transit set everything up if weather and seeing conditions are good ensure your solar filters are on and just dial in your focus and use your exposure settings that you would use for sunspots and start a video or a 1second time-lapse video and just let it run for a bit since planes are fairly large so that's why I'm comfortable with 1 second time-lapse videos if you're not then just use a video then you could just review your videos and see if you got a plane transiting and then you could use third party apps to just get that single frame or multiple frames if you were able to get it during a video so now let's move into the video's next section with astrophotographer and YouTuber niik Carver from nebula photos all right uh so what are your feelings about how new technologies not only smart telescopes are changing the landscape of astrophotography does it kind of take the fun out of learning something that is technical which can be fulfilling and an educational Journey yeah I mean it's a good question I think it really depends on the person you know and but I think that you're framing the question correctly by asking about like does it take the fun out of but maybe it actually adds the fun for some people cuz I talked to a lot of people where it's like all of those technical hurdles are actually not fun based on their personality for my personality those technical hurdles are like what makes astrophotography fun in a lot of ways because it's like it I guess if you're sort of like a challenge oriented person where it's like okay I have this technical challenge I'm going to figure it out I figured it out that's really rewarding but for other people I think maybe the fun part is just like a connection to space and they don't care about the technology part of esap Photography as much they they maybe are just more interested in like I can get under the stars and within five minutes see a picture that this device took of something so so far away and that's really cool um so but I think then you know what I worry about with smart telescopes is how long does that excitement last because I think part of what has like allowed me to you know be really excited about astrophotography for a long time is equipment upgrades even though sometimes I think like people upgrade their equipment too fast and too much it is fun when you get like a new telescope and you try to integrate it and you can do different kinds of pictures and the the smart telescope is sort of like you buy it once and I understand like the the firmware can be upgraded it can get new capabilities but it's not really the same as like changing out a camera or changing out a telescope and so I think the upgrade path maybe sort of like limits the lifespan of the fun with a smart telescope but I I I see sort of a future where there could be both paths because like if you think about where music went it's like I can just listen to music on my smartphone with my earbuds but there's a lot of people out there that like still are buying Hi-Fi systems with physical media and speakers and they get really into it as a hobby so I think asop photography could sort of be the same way there could be like a a a more easy to get into path which would be the smart telescopes and sort of the bespoke path with all of the cables and all the stuff you have to figure out yeah I mean even just like the camera phone right I mean and just the tremendous advances and the overall landscape of Photography digital photography um you know did it open up a vast Avenue for a lot of people to try out photography where they where they otherwise probably wouldn't have definitely you know we've seen other photographer like landscape photographers still live on you know even though the iPhone is out for example so but definitely totally understand and car that's a really that's a really good example because and and it also that's a cool example because it it makes me think of like you they they make predictions like oh the smartphone has totally killed the point and shoot camera but then I'm hearing about how the point and shoot camera is back and everyone wants these like Fuji Po and shoots so it's it's interesting how things go in waves and you can't really predict like the smartphone I mean the smart telescope is just going to kill all these other things I don't think it really ever works like that yeah very thoughtful thank you all right so at the time of this video you've published an incredible series of really helpful videos to help uh photographers prepare for the upcoming total solar eclipse but you also have a couple videos about capturing the Anala which is of course a different type of solar photography that I did not include in this video can you tell us a littleit about what that is and how your progress on your pro project is going sure um okay so what the pattern is of the analemma it's this and it's been known about I guess since like ancient Greece Greek times because I think that's where the word comes from is like ancient Greek analemma but if you are in the same spot um throughout the year just like looking in the same direction usually you're looking South at the same time every day the sun makes this very unique pattern through the sky right so if you if you observe the sun's location every day you'll see that of course it's in a different spot every day right at at noon um like we we know that it's going to be it's going to be lower in the winter and higher in the summer everyone can see that but then if you actually are observing the path that it makes it makes this really cool lopsided Figure 8 pattern and the science reason behind that is because um Earth's orbit around the sun isn't a perfect circle it's actually like an oval and then also our axis is tilted and so when you take those two facts together like we're at a 23° tilt and we're going around the um sun in an oval rather than a circle it creates this really unique pattern uh in this way and so that I don't know if that was a good way to describe it but that that's the analemma if you see a picture of it it'll it'll hopefully make more sense the key thing is if you look at the sun the same time same location every day for a year and you make this Pat you'll you'll see the pattern that emerges now for whatever reason I've I always wanted to do this and have attempted it now three times I've started three times and failed each time so it's one of those projects where I like I know someday I'm going to finish but I haven't finished yet and the the most recent time I was sort of doing that thing where it's like okay if you make your intention public maybe you're more more successful so I made I started making a video series about doing it but I still didn't keep up with it um so I but I know what I have to do now I need to automate it because if I if I just rely on myself like actually going out there and taking a picture at the same time on every clear day it's not going to happen because I just I'm not it's not how my mind works and I'm traveling and just things come up so I need to find some way to like automate the camera so that it's just taking a picture at the same time every day and then I'll just throw out all the Cloudy ones keep all the clear ones and and hopefully it'll work um an easier way to take a year-long picture of the Sun that I also want to try is they make this um they make this like soda can that's like a pinhole camera and then it has a piece of film inside it and you could it's not the analemma but you can still see sort of the path of the sun and a different way over a year so I want to try that too because it's I've seen a really cool pictures from that project I can't remember what it's called now but it it's a really neat um another neat way to capture the sun over the period of a year um well thank you for that beautiful explanation um okay so one of my favorite topics is about just solar activity in general how it affects the Earth the you know things around like surrounding Earth um us humans so I wanted to talk about kind of another type of solar Imaging a little bit more of an indirect type which is capturing the Aurora Borealis or the Aurora Australis um of course commonly known as the northern and southern lights I know that you had the opportunity to visit one of my favorite countries Iceland uh were you able to successfully image the Ora Borealis and do you think smart telescopes would be capable of doing such a thing H good question you know I've I've I've never really thought about smart telescopes in in the context of aurora borealis I I I it's sort of like the same answer but I'm it'll be interesting if we actually get like a smart telescope eventually that is for wide angle asop photography because I'm I'm assuming that's coming at some point um and it would I mean I guess we sort of have it there's like something called like the Arsenal device I believe where it's like it's an attachment you do for your DSLR and it like it allows for all kinds of like crazy uh shots I guess that it's like a hardware attachment that lets you do different time-lapse things and different like composits with uh an app or something so I feel like that might be like the bridge to when we get like the smart Milky Way Aurora type camera but again yeah the the the only limitation I think for using a smart telescope for the Aurora would be that usually people want the wide shots of it and to to back up yes I did success F capture it from Iceland and it was how I got into astrophotography really because uh before that I hadn't taken any pictures of the night sky but I wanted to see the aurora I was already into like cameras and film making so I thought okay I'm going to take pictures of it and then just that experience of of doing that just like really say activated something in me and I was like I really like this like taking pictures at night in quiet Dark Places and so I started doing Milky Way Photography and then eventually uh deep sky as to photography because you know what I found was like okay this is something I can do on trips you know uh find some Grand location take a Milky Way shot or take an aurora shot but I wanted to be doing it all the time so deep sky is really great for that because you can basically do it from anywhere even if you're in a light polluted place you can get a special you know emission nebula filter and and do it from a light polluted place so that's sort of what Aurora is what hooked me and then I I went down the path from there um but I think that yeah I think the the the big issue with the smart telescopes would be the field of view now but but then I remembered like the dwarf does have that wide angle lens so it would be interesting to try that I like you mentioned it's connected to like the sun and solar Cycles so it's like the um when the sun is at maximum like it is now it's like a really good time for the Aurora so then you might have a better chance with something like a drone or a GoPro or a cell phone um but it during like the solar minimum you can still go and capture the Aurora but it's not it's not going to be nearly as bright so then you'd probably want like The Wider faster DSLR lens or something like that well okay so my last question for you the name of your Channel nebula photos you know kind of inherently implies nighttime photography which definitely is you know your primary subject but do you ever see yourself kind of venturing more into solar photography just in general yeah I mean I know there's some people that like are really good at everything I don't think I'm one of those people um so far I haven't been like bidden by that bug I guess I should say I don't I don't know um but then an interesting thing is like Eclipse Imaging a lot of people think that that is just like solar Imaging but I to me they're like they they have all these differences you know it's like cuz when you think of solar imagers it's like they're using the dedicated solar telescope often Imaging in ha with like these like little video cameras like from player one and zwo and that's totally the wrong approach for like a total solar eclipse it's it's like so it's just completely opposite equipment and so I think that's interesting too is like preparing for the total solar Clips is again like a different hobby than regular solar Imaging yeah I've actually have never done solar photography outside of smart telescopes and granted yeah I could just you know get a uh White Light solar filter put it on a DSLR and be good to go but I had just actually just never ventured into that so up until having a smart telescope like I just I was like oh like I never tried it and then I and I was like dude this is like really awesome same like lunar photography and that's kind of one of the things I again like what I like about these smart telescopes is you kind of get to try different things a little bit more accessibly um yeah that's a that's a really cool Point too is like um it sort of going back to your first question of like does this does the smart telescope take the fun out of it but I think even for an experienced person like who does you know a lot of nebula shooting like you or me then the smart telescope could be like this could be like lot of fun to do something different with to do solar Imaging or lunar Imaging or something you've never tried because it's sort of this jack of all trades kind of little thing yeah that's a cool Insight thank you for answering all of my questions those were beautiful answers sure my my pleasure to be on I I love your channel and uh I'm looking forward to to meeting up in Texas likewise yeah absolutely love your channel and just you know it's great to have you on the on the shows the channel and looking forward to Texas it'll be fun great all right thanks Sarah yeah thanks Nico

Channel: SarahMaths Astro

Views: 9,806

Keywords: #space #technology #astronomy #begineerastrophotography

Id: XwSR2a8rBxs

Length: 63min 33sec (3813 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2024