What YOU Can SEE Through a $0, $100 and an $600 Telescope / Camera! 🔭✨👀

why doesn't anyone tell you this when you're growing up tonight alone i have captured the pleiades star cluster the andromeda galaxy and best of all jupiter the largest planet in our solar system and its four largest moons coming up in today's video we're going to look at what you can see yes you with a telescope or camera setup that cost between zero dollars and six hundred dollars i love astronomy my name is damon scotting and this is astronomical i think there are very few things in life that everyone can agree on but one of those things has to be that views like this are just the greatest sights there is okay so the first thing we're going to look at is a budget of zero dollars which implies we are just viewing the night sky with our naked eye and nothing else so we're now going to change the settings on this camera to replicate the human eye this is how many stars i can see right now and how many stars you would see if you're in a same similar area like this with a bottle of just five so what you are now seeing are bottle 5 skies this is how the sky would look within 30 seconds of stepping outside your eyes have had very little time to adjust to your new dark environment but if you allow yourself 20 to 30 minutes then a number of stars you will see will grow dramatically until you see a sky that looks a lot like this [Music] now look at that look at that isn't that amazing okay isn't that one of the most incredible sights you've ever seen it's beautiful it's magnificent regardless of the way you look at it whether you think that is the limit to our universe and the stars in our night sky is all there is or if you believe there are more universes out there it doesn't matter what your view on the outlook of life is we can all agree that that right there is special and it's completely free this doesn't cost you a penny anyone can step outside and appreciate the beauty of the nice guy so is there anything special we can see without the help of a telescope what can we see with the naked eye do you see that small cluster of stars just above my head these are the pleiades otherwise known as the seven sisters the seven sisters are a young star cluster and they will be the main focus of today's video they really are gems of our night sky but for me there is one deep sky object that stands above all others when it comes to spectacle and wonder it appears to many as nothing more than a small unremarkable cloudy patch of light but it is far far more significant than that now just behind me is perhaps one of the greatest sights you can see with the naked eye that fuzzy patch of light has changed the way we view our universe more than anything else in the history of mankind it expanded our horizons further than anything else has ever done it was until the beginning of the 20th century that we really figured out what that fuzzy patch of light was up until that point astronomers figured that that was a solar system in formation but the truth was far more ordering that fuzzy patch of light is the andromeda galaxy it's two and a half million light years away and is the most distant point of light you can see with the naked eye for many of us the suffocating light pollution in our cities is what prevents us from going out and easily seeing these spectacles interestingly the andromeda galaxy is currently on course for a collision with our milky way galaxy in 5 billion years meaning it is only going to get easier to see regardless of where you are on the planet however you shouldn't let light pollution stop you from stargazing altogether last year i stayed slap bang in the center of london one of the most densely light polluted areas on our planet and i was still capable of seeing many wonders in our night sky so let's just imagine for a moment what london would look like without any air or light pollution this is how london would look if you could just see the stars in the night sky [Music] there are so many different wonders in our night sky that you can appreciate without spending any money what so ever but what if you love this hobby so much that you want to take it to the next level what if you do want to spend a little bit of money well if you want to spend around about 20 like i have you can buy yourself a cracked samsung s8 phone it doesn't have to be this phone the goal of this was to just buy a cheap smartphone that has the capability to take long exposure photographs now this has that built in and allows you to do it straight off the phone if you can't do it you can just download a free app to do so what i'm going to do right now is just leave my phone up against my car wheel and then just take some long exposure photos and hopefully we'll take some really nice images and if you want to do this same method and you can capture the beauty of the night sky and not only look back on it yourself if you can show it to your friends and hopefully get them engaged in what is one of the greatest outdoor activities that you can pursue okay so this part probably goes without saying but when you are taking a long exposure image do not shake the camera otherwise you'll get jittery images like this and if you're quick enough you can actually make it into your own photo and throw a little pose in there as you can see the pleiades here are very sharp and i've got to say i'm quite happy with this for 20 dollars one of my favorite things to do is to take night lapses which is where you take multiple long exposure images and make a video like this this is the one time where i will say clouds actually make it look better because clouds and astrophotography are always considered to be an absolute nightmare also if you do go on to take any images after watching this video then please feel free to tag this is astronomical on instagram and i will repost it onto my story cool we have the canon 400d with a 300 millimeter focal length lens that i bought on ebay for 40 quid so the lens was 40 pounds the camera was 30 pounds the reason the lens was so cheap relatively is because it doesn't have an autofocus when it comes to astrophotography that don't matter we don't need the camera to try and focus in for us in fact if anything when it comes to actual photography it's a nightmare using autofocus i am going to try and position it as best as i can i can kind of see it in the viewfinder because it's such an old camera the viewfinder is tiny all right i've got it now this is a handy trick that you're going to need to know because it comes up very useful where's my lens cap there we go so you're going to want to shoot a long exposure but the issue is when you press down the shutter button to take a picture the camera itself shakes a little vibrates which means all the stars in your image for this long exposure photo are jittery they all move around it looks terrible so how can you compensate for that quite easily i'm going to take a five second exposure but really it's going to be about three seconds because i'm going to put the lens cap just in front of the actual lens of the camera take the picture remove the lens cap i haven't attached it just held it in front of it and then voila look at that the fly these the seven sisters easy as that that is actually quite a nice picture okay but we can do better than that and we are going to do better than that at no extra cost so rather than just taking one photo and going yeah i've done it nailed that yeah pub we're actually going to take a bunch of photos and then we're going to use a software called deep sky stacker which is completely free and we're going to take all of those photos that we have and then stack them on top of each other and make an even better photo so this is the final result after stacking pretty much 12 minutes worth of exposures and i've got to say i'm quite happy with that i know the stars don't look great but you can actually see the dust lanes in front of the stars and i think that part is really cool if i want to get rid of the sort of purpley magenta tinge around the stars that need to take longer exposures to reduce the signal noise ratio you can see the same problem here in this picture i took of the orion nebula but with all that being said for 70 pounds what an incredible image this camera and lens have taken you know i i thought it would be a nice quiet spot to take pictures of stars but it turned out to be quite a hot spot for people to hot box and if you don't know what that means good good on you you've made some good choices in life okay so let's shoot jupiter let's uh let's capture the biggest planet in our solar system with just a little camera [Applause] [Music] well that looked weird all right so we're going to zoom in all the way for 300 millimeters fantastic get rid of that light okay here we go [Music] the biggest planet in our solar system oh wow uh so oh wow wow wow wow wow wow okay holy crap all right no okay yeah okay i don't even think this through um so i took a fairly long exposure i'm gonna take another one um it took a very long exposure then two seconds and because i took a long exposure tube is pretty bright but guess what else you can make out i'm shaking the images guess what else you can make out in this picture of jupiter its four largest moons the galilean moons all right got it so if i zoom in you can see not only some stars next to it but zooming all the way in yes yes yes yes okay all right you can see all four of jupiter's galilean moons the four largest moons orbiting the gas giant i don't know which ones are which because i couldn't tell you that right now maybe if they're a bit further away from the planet itself they're actually quite close on the left you've got two moons on the right like just to the right of it you've got another moon and then really far out you've got another moon uh if i had to guess what the far one out was i'd probably say callisto because that orbits the furthest out from the planet um oh frickin hell that's cool screw that screw the moon screw the seven sisters well we have got the moons of jupiter i actually managed to find a website that shows you a calculator and the precise positions of the moons going around the planet jupiter and what's interesting is it also shows these two black dots on the surface of the planet now if you haven't already figured out what those are they are shadows being cast onto the surface of jupiter by its moons and that for a telescope is just honestly the craziest thing imaginable you don't need an amazing telescope to do so in fact a decent eight or ten inch one will allow you to see so jupiter's galilean moons are each wonders of our solar system they're special places and the fact that we can see from our own back gardens shadows being cast onto the surface of this planet is ridiculous our next contender is one you may not have seen before it's called the dwarf telescope and it's made by a company called tiny scope this compact telescope has a fixed focal length of 382 millimeters and a built-in camera which you can see as a live view on your mobile device i think this is a very cool gimmick and i was excited to give this a try if you do go into their website although just say 150 dollars for the telescope you can add a 30 coupon to get over 120 it comes packaged very nicely and it's about the size of a water bottle i'd say it's smaller than that size to be honest for the price you're paying it is similar to what most people spend on the cheapest beginner telescopes it's very easy to set up here i'm using one of the attachments which is the wi-fi box basically i plug it into there and it acts as a power supply but also transmits the live view to my phone you can just use a cable to plug that directly into your phone and get a live view like that but this allows you to go wireless and move around if you wish to the app has settings that allow you to adjust exposure gain white balance contrast and saturation which is very helpful when you're trying to get the most detail as possible out of an image but as you can see here from this view of jupiter the large planet our solar system we can make out one of its moons but we can't make out any surface detail now that is something that certainly with amateur telescopes you can make out and i'd say the reason you can't do so with this telescope is because the camera digital camera built in isn't quite good enough but it can discern the shape of another planet this banana shape may seem familiar to many keen astrophotographers it actually comes from one of the inner rocky planets this particular one is venus because venus orbits closer to the sun than we do we rarely see it fully illuminated instead we see it in a sort of crescent shape or a banana shape in fact it's at its brightest when the least amount of it is illuminated which does sound kind of contradictory so although you can't see any surface deal on jupiter you can make out the shape of venus which i think is quite cool then moving on to a different aspect not just looking at planets but trying to image the stars when people buy telescopes they tend to spend just as much if not more on the cameras so this having one built in is seemingly very handy it saves the images that i take of the pleiades straight to my phone i can adjust the settings there in the app and as you can see the picture is decent you you can make out the stars there are different colors there i suddenly say this is perfect but it is very decent for the price that you're paying i also like the fact that you can zoom into what you're looking at this dwarf telescope might prove to be even better to use in daylight when looking at distant objects but we're talking strictly about astrophotography here and it can do a decent amount the next test i put it to was to look at mizar and also which are a binary star system or at least that's how they look to their naked eye with the help of the dwarf telescope you can see that there is a third star orbiting nearby but the reality is it doesn't stop there mizar and also are not alone they actually make up a sextuplet star system when viewed for a telescope the stars almost look like they're making a smiley face now if you're on a planet that was orbiting around one of these stars then your lifestyle would be chaotic because the light and heat energy you'd be receiving on the surface of your planet wouldn't be consistent throughout the year a different point to receive more heat from different stars and different light from different stars honestly it'd be an absolute nightmare it looks pretty but it'd be chaotic the images you're about to see now were achieved with a 10 inch telescope that can be found used for 300 pounds or brand new for 539 pounds now for the majority of us orion is the most famous constellation there is and that is largely in part because it's the most easily identifiable constellation in our night sky in fact i bet when you step out at night and look up at the stars amongst the first ones you look for are the free the makeup orion's belt the constellation itself is a sight to behold it contains a rich variety of stars red white and blue but even the ancient greeks could have possibly envisioned the wonders that lied just beyond our naked eye capabilities just below orion's belt is its sword and within that is the great orion nebula [Music] the orion nebula is effectively a stellar nursery it's an immense cloud of dust and gas in which stars are born for me seeing the orion nebula for the first time for a telescope was a major turning point in my life there are few things more majestic and magical than a colossal cloud of dust and gas in which stars are born the idea itself is something even beyond what the greeks may have imagined in their time and yet it is true and best of all you can appreciate it in all of its glory with even the most basic telescope or pair of binoculars the biggest limiting factor we've had so far is the rotation of planet earth we cannot take long exposures without stars trailing so in order to correct for this we have bought the sky watcher pro 2i we're going to mount the canon 400d and the lens you saw earlier on top of this and hopefully achieve some nice looking long exposures if you are familiar with my previous videos then you will know that i do all of my videos alone which can put you into some very awkward situations what you're about to see is a very british conversation that took place just after midnight on a saturday all right filming the stars the two blokes eventually drove off looking just as confused as i do setting this rig up i managed to get a few shots that apply these before i packed away and called it a knight in the meantime i did manage to achieve some long exposures of the pleiades i got about 60 seconds per exposure which isn't amazing but it's still pretty good and as you can see here i was very focused to the point where i have a major gorm face yeah see that right there that's the face that could be on the cover of magazines so we have our final image we have stacked 14 60 second exposures of the pleiades and this is what we have so in comparison to the previous image with a canon 400d they have the same total exposure time but this one is a lot more detailed and clearer i did manage to image one more target the following night do you remember that cloudy patch of light well i managed to put a lot more time into imaging the andromeda galaxy than i did for the pleiades i achieved 27 two-minute long exposures and stacked them together to create this masterpiece okay maybe not masterpiece the core itself is completely blown out there are plenty of better images of the andromeda galaxy out there but i will say they likely have better equipment than i do so we have now completed all of our images and we can compare our different budgets and see the images each one achieved now the naked eye is a very distant looking object but still nonetheless beautiful in its own right we have the pleiades achieve the canon 400d we made out of dust lanes the tiny scope dwarf telescope couldn't quite bring out much detail but it is better other things and then lastly we have our biggest budget setup and that is by far the most stunning image i will say one final thing regarding the dwarf telescope and that is that they're about to bring out a new version of it the dwarf 2 telescope and it has a very special feature that i've never seen before and that is built-in star stacking which is honestly really cool and i'm excited to try it out especially because its cost is going to be 349 dollars in this comparison here it does make some good points about what it can do and other steps can't do but i don't agree with that last point about it being portable and the others aren't being portable i'd say dwarf 2 is ultra portable and the others are just portable because i will happily carry any of those other two setups around with me arguably the most important lesson i hope you take from this video is to have patience when stargazing because you will be blown away by what you can see if you just sit and wait 20 30 minutes and allow your eyes to adjust to the wonders of our night sky so what are you waiting for get outside [Music]

Channel: Damon Scotting

Views: 1,085,409

Keywords: Science, Presenter, Young, Damon, Scotting, thisisastronomical, astronomical, this is astronomical, damon scotting, young science presenter, SPACE, astronomy, astrophysics, space documentary, astronomy documentary, space 4k, astronomy 4k, james webb, James Webb Telescope, Hubble, Hubble space telescope, Telescopes, Telescope, JWST, NASA

Id: uOkv-XvXRfI

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 26 2021