"Take Us With You for a Night of Astrophotography"

so now that I know I have this great spot with the southern Horizon I can actually shoot the target that I wanted to capture tonight probably the most popular deep Sky Target for early June in the northern hemisphere at least can you guess what it is [Music] so I'm heading to a dark sky site a bortle 3 tonight it's an Airbnb rental I'm just doing a one nighter and I've actually been there before I went in 2021 and it was a nice dark spot the unfortunate thing is it's gone up a light pollution level since I was there last if you can believe that in just Less Than 3 years little tip for trips like this you know when you're going to a dark sky spot you don't want to forget anything aside from bringing two of cable you need which I am is to build your rig at home first with all the connections and then either kind of keep it partially assembled when you pack it up or take it all apart but at least that way you know you're not missing anything it's fully ready to go in my experience the most forgotten items are extra batteries uh do heater band and the actual power adapter cords themselves I've forgotten these more than once I should mention that the forecast has become Progressive ly worse throughout the day and especially since yesterday when I booked this trip so it's about 100 bucks to stay here so it could go either way obviously hoping for Clear Skies but it's one of those forecasts where the clouds don't know what they're doing so I'm hoping it clears up as I get closer to the location I'm about 50 minutes out all right so I'm here in checkon still cloudy and the latest forecast on clear outside looks terrible on Astros spheric it looks slightly better but all you can do is set up and hope for the best it's weird being here in the summer now it was February when I was here last get this tripod nice and high so I can get a better chance at shooting over the trees hopefully those aren't going to be an issue so I was talking to the owner and asking him if there was any way I can get behind the tree line for a lower view of the Southern Horizon and he's like well why don't you just go where the campers Park I'm like where the camper Park he's like yeah you should go over there so yeah this is this is a slight upgrade from where I was before look at that Horizon so now that I know I have this great spot with the southern Horizon I can actually shoot the target Target that I wanted to capture tonight probably the most popular deep Sky Target for early June in the northern hemisphere at least can you guess what it is the row Uki Cloud complex So based on the forecast I'm seeing I'm not going to have long to capture it it's out nice and early I'll basically see Scorpius as soon as it gets dark out and then based on what I'm seeing it looks like around 1:00 it's going to Cloud over so hopefully if I can get an hour or two on row that would be great I could definitely do something with that brought my red cat 51 250 mm focal length nice and wide for row oyuki I wanted to shoot with the ronon 135 lens even wider that would have been perfect for row but I don't have it sorted out with the new adapter I have for my ASI cameras and I didn't want to take any chances tonight so I'm going for the sure thing tonight with the William Optics redcap 51 and the ZW SI 2400 MC Pro so the mount itself is a ZW am3 nice and portable the Redcat 51 as well within the maximum payload capacity for this Mount and then I have the ASI air so I'll control the mount the camera guiding everything from the ASI air on my phone I have a feeling I'm going to hear some coyotes howling tonight and I can't wait so I might just open up the trunk and sleep in there tonight right next to the rig and nice and comfy pretty well under the stars this is such a cool spot I can hear cows mooing behind me if you're ever in a new spot like this and you don't really know exactly where North is first of all sun setting in the west as a dead giveaway but you can use stellarium and then just use the uh augmented star map and you get a pretty reasonable rough idea of where North is gives you at least a starting point and then you can fine-tune it from there slightly unlevel ground I'm on here I didn't bring my battery with me cuz I didn't know I'd be setting up out here but the owner of this property lent me two super long extension cords so I'm good to go way out here it's nice to have a little more privacy from the main house too this might be standard travel astrography stuff for some of you but you know one of the key things I always say to people that haven't done this before is that you need to get everything sorted out before it gets dark out because when you're at a dark sky sight it's black at night and you don't want to be still in the middle of setting up when that happens I always like to get all the b-roll of the gear in before the cables go on cuz it's so messy you can actually see what you're looking at so I just have my velcro strip on here and then I'll stick the ASI air plus right onto the side of the red cat here and then for storage I have a 128 GB USB 3.1 thumb drive in the air that's how I transfer my files this one has a nice fast read speed of 400 mbytes per second so obviously I'll be using the ASI air to control the whole run with my phone um now let's get all the cables connected here so I see some really impressive rigs out there with Incredible cable management skills where everything's tied up nice and neat I am not one of those people but my excuse is I'm constantly using new gear and swapping everything out so even if I did kind of Tuck everything away and make it all neat and tidy it wouldn't last long it would just be getting torn apart before the next video so that's my excuse anyway but the main thing is no cable snags things are thoughtfully placed um so while the mount is sing around that nothing's going to catch uh the ASI air makes everything a lot easier because you can you know consolidate everything on board on the telescope you know for many years I use my laptop with just a spaghetti drape down so it's better now than it's ever been but I still get some slack for it couple things to notice the US USB 3.0 ports here again this may not be true this is as far as I understand it you'll want the so the blue Port so the USB 3.0 not the 2.0 you definitely want your camera to be in one of those and you want your memory card your thumb drive to be in one of those because that's where that that transfer speed makes a difference you wouldn't want any uh you know delay and images coming through or anything like that that's the way I've always done it it's always served me well what do we got left here okay the guy camera oo this one's looking a little rusty maybe I'll choose a different one out of all the cables the USB C is by far the most abundant it's the charger for my phone and many other devices it's like we almost we could almost agree one cable for everything so all that's left here is the power cable to the ASI air and one to the Mount and then the do heater bands so this uh what you see right here is a little mini power bar from Amazon and it has three USB ports that I use for my USB powered do heaters so for a little rig like this it's more than enough I also like on this tripod that there's a hook on the bottom in the center point so anything I hang here is just continuously adding more weight more stability to the tripod overall which is great all right where is this one going and you always want to hang the heavy part you know up close to the hook and make sure it's in there and that there's no tension on the actual power port you want that to be nice and loose let's go in there and one more the ones I use are the actually Celestron branded 12vt 5 amp that's probably your safest bet when it comes to power for astronomy gear because these are the ones that were recomended to me by skywatcher uh that are good for the eq6 and E8 which are known to be a bit finicky for power so if they're good for that then I trust them with everything else I'm sure they're you know there's identical versions that are not branded uh SEL strong but this way you just know for sure where am I going okay front of the mount okay it looks like I have not forgotten anything not yet anyway oh the other cool thing about this tripod is that you can unlock this oh there it goes and just swivel it around smoothly like this which is great for Polar alignment and then lock it in you don't have to just rely on these fine tuning knobs uh which which I do but for you know course adjustments if you will this guy is nice let's hang that back up got this down to a fine art as you can see clearly that's why you guys watch this channel right [Music] [Music] so the row Cloud complex that I'm shooting tonight the reason I think it's such an incredibly popular deep Sky Target is one main reason and that is color it has the most diverse mix of colors in a single area in the entire sky and and objects to be in general there is hydrogen emission nebula the magentas and pinks there is bright red and terries the star that is lighting up dust around it so it's bright orange there's M4 a globular cluster in there and then there's lots of blue reflection nebulosity in the area as well and dark nebula it it's all swirl rolling together in this multicolored magical looking deep Sky object and it really is a camera lens Target it is massive you know with most telescopes you're you're right inside it on one part of it at 250 which is pretty well as wide as it gets for a telescope I will be able to get most of it all the good bits anyway but it extends even past there so you know a camera lens something like the roken on 135 would be the best choice for row but it's a stunning Target and it's a bit tricky because so it's in the tail of Scorpius if you're familiar with the bright red and terries in Scorpius it doesn't get very high from you know midn Northern latitudes so it just kind of skirts the southern Horizon so you need to get somewhere with a low Horizon and then it doesn't really stay out long either so right now mid June early to mid June is the best time to go after row I'm not using any type of filter with this one shot color camera tonight so the name of the game is going to be 3 minute exposures at medium gain or Unity gain on this ASI 2400 MC Pro so big sensor big field of view the native field of view on this Redcat 51250 with no filter so I'm collecting all of that glorious natural light especially those precious Blues in the reflection nebula this is a really neat time of night so it's about 20 to 10 we're you know we're almost at summer solstice these are very long days and short nights and it looks like there's no stars in the sky but if you look closer there's a few so there's Arcturus glowing kind of orange and then over here we have Vega if you can spot it there it is and so signis will be you know below there and those are the only two I see out now but anares and Scorpius will be coming out very soon it's another orange star that kind of stands out I'm just kind of waiting for it to pop out visually you can see that crescent moon of course but right now oh I see spika as well that's the direction of spika there so spika Arcturus and Vega three very bright stars that you can see right now and a very important one that's going to be popping up soon is uh the North star Polaris it'll be right in that region somewhere but yeah it's one of those cool times of uh night when it's like the they're popping up by the second just finished polar aligning and the camera is roughly in Focus but we're going to slew over to the bright star that is in the field of view of the target we're shooting tonight so I'm just going to use the ASI air and the sky Atlas and select and terries it's a nice bright star to focus on and get us started so unfortunately it's uh there's a lot of high wispy clouds I'm sure you can see them on the camera which is too bad but all we can do is get lined up and get everything ready for you know the chance that it does clear up so it's detected and it is now centered so I'm going to go ahead and use the batoff mask in the lens cap of the redcap 51 to get this focused okay I'm I'm framed up here I've got the r oyuki Cloud complex frame just the way I want it including the rotation that I want uh in my field of view you can see it there in the sky Atlas on the ASI a and I just wanted to share this with you I'm going to take my first 30 second exposure this is just a preview exposure just to see what that looks like now to the naked eye I can see the of scorpus now even though there's lots of high clouds in the sky you can see them especially through the images but I think this is going to be enough for you to actually see the start of what this final image is going to look like which is really exciting here we go let's take a look at this and it's still not completely dark out yet probably another 15 minutes or so okay very cool so we can see in terries we can see I think that's that's M4 globular cluster there there's another smaller cluster in there and then the objects north of those are some you know dark dust and reflection nebula so you won't be able to see those in a a quick exposure like this although I can kind of see some dust obscuring the stars behind it even in this little test preview shot so this this is the beginning of a really cool project and as long as those clouds hold out we may actually get something tonight [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: AstroBackyard

Views: 32,358

Keywords: astrophotography, telescope, camera, photography, astrobackyard, nebula, rho ophiuchi, Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex

Id: jl6Ov-jEXcM

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 15 2024