To Get Better Images, Slow Down & Spend More Time On the Target

we live beneath an amazing sky right above our heads are countless billions of stars and nebula millions of comets many planets dozens of moons around nearby worlds and vast billions of other galaxies perhaps an Infinity of them and for those of us who fall in love with the story of the sky and take to Imaging it it can be tempting to try to capture it all and I remember in my early days of astrophotography trying to do just that planning three even four targets per night and it's fun to do that you can catch a little glimpse of this and that and even with a little exposure with a good modern telescope and camera you can get a decent image but if you really want to improve your images my advice is slow it down slow it way down so today I thought we would take a look at a couple of projects I've been working on one is about 95% complete and the other is about I'd call it 40% complete but both the projects have enough completion to use them as illustrations here and they illustrate I think very well the value of slowing down and taking a whole night or even multiple nights on a single Target because the more light you collect the more definition the more color the more beautifully saturated high quality signal you will get and overall your image is going to benefit and the benefit will be clear and obvious it won't be subtle the first thing we'll look at is an image of the wizard nebula that I shot roughly a year ago it was one of the first images that I shot with what was at the time a new rig the Williams Optics 81 mm Xena star and the player one Uranus C osc camera now the magnitude of the wizard nebula is reported at plus 7.2 it's too dim for the human eye to see but as deep Sky objects go it's not that dim and I was at the time calibrating the camera so I was going quickly from object to object trying to get a sense of how the telescope and Camera combination would work so if memory serves I only put in about 2 or 3 hours on this target but even so it's enough to get the general shape of the nebula and the osc was sensitive enough to capture a wide range of the gases even the dimmer gases like the blue gases right around here and 2 to 3 hours of integration time was also enough to reveal the wizard in the Wizard nebula now an alternative name for this nebula is Believe It or Not the Harry Potter and the golden snitch nebula and there's the snitch right over there as well of course there is barely any color in this nebula at least in 2 to 3 hours of integration we have some red some yellow and a little bit of the hint of the beginning of blue around the upper Center but by and large unless one looks really closely there's just a lot of yellowish red in here and it's not very appealing and the reason I didn't even try to develop out the color was this signal was so weak that trying to break up and develop out the colors just weakened each individual color channel so much that the image quickly began to granulate but this year almost exactly a year later I decided to image the wizard nabila properly and so using the power of the wide aperture of ancts Schmid cast grain telescope and the player 1 Aries M camera with good lrgb filters I determined to do a proper Imaging of the nebula now at first when I started Imaging this nebula I thought I could capture its data really well over just 2 days and two days gave me this as you can see we have a lot more detail in this image the wizard stands out much more clearly he seems to be emerging from the billowing gases of the nebula the snitch glows up in the upper left corner and I was able to develop out the roiling blue gases in the upper center of the image but if you look in the space around the image you can see there is a fair bit of mud and a lot of undefined gas mud in an image means there is a lack of adequate signal the camera doesn't really know how to define that area so it gets muddy if you are unfamiliar with the concept of mud in photography it is a concept board from art in painting in particular and it refers to when colors get to be desaturated and washed out looking or to the muddled blend of colors that become of paints on an artist palette after a day of painting in astrophotography we often see mud as modeled space those are areas where the signal is weak and the camera doesn't really know how to define the space versus whatever our subject is here's a great illustration of mud this is an image of the Leo triplet that I shot I think it was on the same night that I shot that very brief image of the wizard nebula when I was first figuring out the capabilities of the Williams Optics telescope combined with the player 1 Uranus C camera and this image is all mud the less that you see in the space between and around the galaxies that's mud and one might even say that the washed out signal of the galaxies themselves they're muted and modeled color that also is another definition of mud now I hate mud I don't by any means consider myself a painter not not even close but I took a couple art classes back in my University days wherein we studied drawing and painting working with pastels and other stuff and due to those classes I came into the photography and videography world with an absolute hatred of mud and so I've always worked very hard to keep it out of my images including my astrophotography images so upon seeing this outcome of the wizard nebula I was happy with the direction it was going but I wasn't happy with the final outcome it became very obvious that while the overall magnitude of the wizard nebula might be reported at 7.2 there was a great deal of fine information in the nebula that would absolutely require more integration time so I decided to put in another two nights on the wizard nebula and the outcome was this now we can see that the colors are becoming richer and more defined and not just the colors but the luminance information is also resolving into greater detail I can push the developments of this image much further and the result is now we have a very clearly defined wizard emerging from the nebula and doing whatever he's doing with the snitch plus this much Imaging time allows us to much better Define detail in the dark regions of the nebula such as as bulbous regions separating out from the main body and the billowing arch of black gases between the wizard and the snitch but while the definition that I was looking for was coming into focus it was clear that more could be resolved out of this image and that called for another night so I was able to get a full summer night at that point about six quality hours on the wizard nebula and the addition of that fifth Knight yielded this now we have much finer resolution of the dark and subtle shading within the nebula Shadows over the roiling and billowing gases and dark Lanes of Stardust are much more clearly defined as well as the dim and delicate Cloud structures behind the wizard right over here not only that but the additional information allowed much better and more refined development of the color within the nebula the blue at the upper center of the nebula could be developed along with more definition of the shades of blue in that region and the varying shades of the Reds could be developed to bring out the oranges and the yellows toward the center and compare and contrast them with the darker red regions lower right and upper left the snitch itself could be properly dimmed to show the chain of stars within and capture all of that fine detail I still don't consider this image quite fully done and I plan to shoot it for one more good night when I get a chance but do I consider having spent so much time on a single Target to have been worth it absolutely all that additional time spent gathering information on the wizard nebula transformed the final image from ordinary to extraordinary let's take a moment and look at one more case study this is of the Cresent nebula and whereas I consider the wizard nebula to be about 95% done one more full night will just help me to resolve additional very fine detail this nebula is still very much in development and so far I've only had two nights on it and it is the middle of summer here in Canada so two nights is very short the first image which we're seeing now represents a total of 2.5 hours integration time and the second image which we'll see shortly is another 4 hours integration time on the second night the sky was clearer so I got more integration time but the scene was poor and required more aggressive calling so here you're looking at an image of the Crescent nebula with just one night or that 2.5 hours of integration I had mentioned earlier and for just 2.5 hours it's it's not bad a big part of the reason that it's not bad is I was using a big reflector telescope that 23mm 8 in Celestron SCT that has been living in the observatory since the beginning of 2024 all the real estate on a larger mirror like that as contrasted with the smaller amounts of real estate available say in the lens of a refractor is going to be able to resolve more detail and that's what we're seeing here even with just 2.5 hours of integration time but upon inspecting this image it looks to me to be nowhere near the full potential quality that can be obtained out of this DSO combined with this telescope and Camera combination this image was shot with the Celestron C8 sctt and a player one Aries M using zwo lrgb filters in the image train so about a week later I had another clear night and there was virtually no moon there was a quarter moon low in the west and that moon was about 100 de off from the target it was already very low in the west and within a couple hours it had set so the moon did not create an issue however when the image was shot it was well into June and at this point in time a full night was only 5 hours and 45 minutes and with time loss rotating filters redoing focus and dithering that gave about oh 4 hours and 30 minutes total integration time and by the time I had aggressively selected out any lowquality subs I was left with just under 4 hours of integration time which got added to the previous night's 2 hours and 30 minutes and that yielded this result the additional time gathering information has revealed so much more we have in this image much better resolution of the dim red gases that surround the Crescent nebula as well as the delicate bluish gases that move in faint whs around the nebula and Surround it almost like a wispy atmosphere over the nebula and in the darker regions B shadowed loes of Det tail emerge among the gases hidden within the deepest Stations of the Crescent nebula it really looks like a big space brain you know for ages I was never able to remember the name of this thing because I look at it and think space brain and I would call it the brain nebula so I said it over and over to myself until I could finally remember its proper name the Crescent nebula but it is beautiful isn't it and this project isn't done I want at least 6 more hours of good integration on it the weather report is good for tonight so maybe I'll get that this evening or close to it but I know that there is more detail in those Shadows that can be drawn out but ultimately the thing to take out of this video is that that beautiful sky overhead presents us with possibly an Infinity of potential interesting subjects and the story of the sky is Rich and deep and it is natural for those of us who fall in love with this passion for for astrophotography it is natural for us to want to shoot it all and everything in all photography is a trade-off you can shoot a variety of dsos briefly and quickly get a collection of good images or you can find a single deep Sky object that you fall so much in love with that you spend multiple nights on it and obtain such an image that it will leave you and everyone else who sees it Jaws dropped so in the end what I'm saying is to get better slow down be patient take your time shooting that amazing sky thank you for watching and thank you all of you who keep coming back to the channel to learn how to do astrophotography with me and learn the story of the sky thank you for so much this channel is just growing so fast my sincere thanks now as always have a blast doing Astor photography and get out there and shoot the sky

Channel: SKY STORY

Views: 2,935

Keywords:

Id: MfqTleUvvts

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2024