This Cheap Lens is Actually GREAT for Astrophotography!

i've been waiting for this night all year long this location these conditions at this time of year this exact night hi everyone this is trevor jones from astro backyard and tonight i'm going to photograph a nebula in space using a 200 camera lens [Music] so i'm pretty far off the beaten path right now there's no people that live pretty anywhere near where i am right now and i looked down the path that i drove down when i got here and there was this dark figure sitting in the middle of the grass and i could tell it was an animal and i got the binoculars out and it was just this black cat sitting and staring at me and as i walked towards him i wanted to see if he was friendly he just ran off but i was like that's kind of creepy and definitely a first i'm at one of my favorite places in the world this is the location where it all began actually i took my very first photo of the lagoon nebula through a telescope back in 2013 and tonight i'm gonna do it again my first deep sky photo of the lagoon nebula was taken with a thousand dollar telescope and a dslr camera this time around i'm going to use one of the cheapest camera lenses on the market and that is the canon ef 75 to 300 millimeter zoom lens i won't use a fancy dedicated astronomy camera or even an astro modified dslr camera what i'm using tonight is an entry-level canon eos rebel t7 dslr camera completely stock with no filters inside or out i don't think most people realize that you can capture incredible images of nebulae in space using an ordinary dslr camera and kit lens but there is one key piece of astrophotography equipment needed for a great shot of a nebula and it is not a telescope the key to capturing a great photo of a nebula in space using a camera and lens is a star tracker it's essentially a smaller version of a motorized equatorial telescope mount like the bigger ones you've seen me use on this channel before this will allow me to capture long exposure images of nebulae in space at longer focal lengths in the case of this lens to a maximum of 300 millimeters if you don't have a star tracker like this you can still take pictures of bright nebulae like the one i'm shooting tonight with a stationary tripod but your exposures will have to be much shorter because the stars will begin to trail after only a few seconds when you compensate for the rotation of the earth all of a sudden exposure time isn't an issue anymore you're free to experiment with less aggressive iso settings a lower f-stop to sharpen things up and choose an exposure length that's appropriate for the brightness of your deep sky object and your tracker's capabilities that way you don't have to crank the iso on your camera settings and you're not asking too much out of a little star tracker the subject of my attention tonight is of course the stunningly beautiful lagoon nebula in sagittarius the lagoon nebula is big it is bright and it is right next door to the equally as amazing triffid nebula if you're new to astrophotography you may want to stick to the brighter targets at least to begin with while you get your system ironed out brighter deep sky nebulae like this make framing focusing and even sometimes image processing a lot easier i'm under border scale class 5 skies right now which is going to lead to a better picture of this nebula but the lagoon nebula is so bright it's a great target to try from the city even under light polluted skies oh god the bugs are bad bugs are bad actually the hardest part about photographing this nebula from the northern hemisphere is getting a nice low horizon to the south because it sits very low in sagittarius not so bad in south florida but a little tougher here in ontario canada here's a look at the complete setup it's a radiant carbon fiber tripod on top of that is the sky watcher star adventure 2i star tracker a camera ball head on top with the canon t7 rebel dslr and the canon ef 75 to 300 millimeter lens this is a cheap kit lens i in fact did get this lens as a part of a kit with the canon rebel t7 and if you remember my video earlier this year the kit lens challenged i was pleasantly surprised with the performance of this budget camera lens you can find it brand new for 200 online as you can probably tell this is a very lightweight setup which is great for this type of astrophotography you want to get to a dark sky area if possible and you want to shoot during around the new moon phase for the best results on nebulae projects something else to consider is that you'll want to use some sort of remote timer or remote shutter release cable this is the one i use here it's just a cheap amazon model and this will allow you to take longer exposure images that are longer than 30 seconds but also it allows you to set a sequence of images to run automatically another thing to consider with a setup like this is having some sort of do prevention or do control because as it gets colder at night you might see that water your condensation starts to build up on your camera lens quickly ending your imaging session so some sort of do heater band with a controller to run it or one of those usb type style ones another thing is a focusing mask a baton off mask will really help you sharpen up those stars by giving you a focusing aid for that so there's plenty of sizes of baton off masks available for any kind of lens that you may have okay it's starting to get darker out now which means the north star polaris will appear any minute now and then i can polar align this star tracker and then i'll accurately be spinning with the rotation of the earth and essentially freeze deep sky objects like the lagoon nebula in the night sky i'll take several image exposures of about two minutes long each at iso 1600 those are the camera settings i'll be using i'll manually focus the camera on a bright star close to the lagoon nebula and then pan over to it manually on the star tracker and line it up i'll take lots of test exposures to make sure it's framed up nicely and it's nice and sharp i'll collect as many of these two minute long exposures of the lagoon nebula tract as i can and then in the image processing phase of things i will stack all of that data together to improve the signal-to-noise ratio and process hopefully a really great image now the optics on this lens are budget but based on my experience using this lens in the past it's nothing that can't be easily overcome in the image processing stage with a few tweaks this is me standing in a shed at 1am on a tuesday all alone while everyone else is asleep you'd think that astrophotography is a lonely hobby but i didn't feel alone in fact i felt more connected to everything maybe humans are supposed to have a deep connection with the night sky in a strange way when you look up you see yourself you see the ones you love you feel at peace with a bigger timeline and where you fit within it and guess what the deeper you look the better it gets [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: AstroBackyard

Views: 188,834

Keywords: nebula photography, astrophotography, DSLR camera, camera settings, camera lens, camera for astrophotography, astrophotography lens, camera lens for astrophotography, how to, how to photograph a nebula, Canon T7, Canon EF 75-300, kit lens, astrophotography without telescope, beginner

Id: _gllwIvPqGE

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021