Did you know you can capture beautiful
photos of the milky way
and deep sky objects with photography
gear you may already have?
If you want to get started with deep sky
astrophotography with just
a camera, a lens, and a tripod
then this video will show you every step
of the process
including planning capturing and editing
your photos.
Hi everyone! My name is Nico Carver and I'm a deep sky astrophotographer
and my website is at nebulaphotos.com
and
this youtube channel is all about
helping beginners get started with
astrophotography which i think is the
most fun
and rewarding hobby out there i'll also
just
mention briefly here at the start that i
do have a patreon
to support this channel and i want to
thank everyone who's already supporting
me on patreon it really means a lot
and if you're interested in joining my
patreon starts at just
one dollar a month in this video i'm
going to show you
how to capture deep sky objects and by
that i mean
objects out in space that are outside of
our solar system
and specifically we'll be capturing
nebulae
that's just the plural for nebula and
we're going to be capturing the nebulae
in the core of our own milky way galaxy
our framing is going to include the
lagoon
trifid omega and eagle nebulae
and if you've seen my previous no
tracker video where we captured the
orion nebula
this one's going to be sort of similar
but a little different
especially the processing and to keep it
interesting i'm also going to be
shooting with not just
one camera but two i have here a stock
canon 60d and then i also bought a canon
60d that's been modified
for astrophotography and that means it
it fully passes the hydrogen alpha
emission line the idea in really simple
terms is that
red nebulae should appear brighter and a
bit more
detailed and a bit more red in the final
picture with this camera
compared to this camera so anyways i'll
be shooting the same patch of sky with
both cameras and then we'll compare the
results at the end of the video
to see how much of a difference a
modified dslr
makes when we're doing untracked
astrophotography just meaning
astrophotography
without a star tracker or an equatorial
amount
but the main focus of this video is just
learning the steps
so i'm going to show you every step of
how i'm going to plan this out
capture and edit some photos of the core
of the milky way it's sort of like a
milky way photography
we are shooting the milky way core and
we'll see it but
i'm not doing a really wide angle milky
way photography with landscape
we're going to be shooting at 50
millimeter a little bit more zoomed in
on and trying to feature the deep sky
objects
um because i'm going to show every step
and detail along the way
i know this video is going to be long
but there is going to be a table of
contents with time stamps in the
description so
feel free to skip ahead if you want um
there's a lot to go over if you just
want to see the processing just skip to
that
also in the description will be a link
to my website with
sample files exactly what i'm shooting
so if you want to follow along with the
processing part using the same files i'm
working with then you can
alright enough intro let's get into it
so let's start with the three pieces of
equipment you'll need
to take pictures of a deep sky object
and luckily they're things
i think most photographers already have
the first thing you'll need is a tripod
and for astrophotography the sturdier
the tripod the better
however sometimes when you're traveling
especially to a dark
site maybe somewhere you know exotic
you'll need something small and so for
this shot i'm going to be using my
backpacking tripod
which is this me photo road trip it's
uh a hundred a hundred dollars new i
believe and it will work fine for this
purpose
the main thing you want to make sure
with a tripod
that has a ball head like this one is
that it's designed
to support your camera and lens
and that you can tighten it down nice
and tight
so that it doesn't slowly droop under
the weight of the camera and lens when
you're doing long exposures
it really needs to stay put and not move
so that we get
nice round stars and sometimes what
you'll find
is that the tripod is fine but the ball
head that it came with
is not up to the job in that case you
can just go to
a store like b h and find a replacement
ball head with good reviews and specs in
your price range when i say specs i mean
you really want to get something that's
weighted for much more weight than
you're putting on it
then when you get your replacement fall
head all you do is you unscrew the old
one
and you put on the new one so this is a
a
ball head out of germany that's weighted
for 60 pounds it's been pretty good to
me
um and the thing i like about it is that
you can
you can really loosen this ball head up
and then you can do this
friction tightening like this and so
then it's pretty secure but then you can
really lock it down with this knob
and now it's like incredibly secure and
it's not going to move at all
okay for the camera as i mentioned i'll
be using the canon
60d which is not the newest and greatest
that canon makes
but a big part of my motivation here is
to show you that you can do this with
the camera that you have
don't feel like you have to go out and
buy a new camera for instance
just use what you have first and as i
said in the intro i have a stock 60d
and then i have this modified 60d
i bought both of these cameras used
they're not available new
the stock 60d was 300 on ebay
and the modified 60d was 400
so just 100 more on cloudy nights
classifieds which is a really
uh great forum and then the classifieds
is a good place to buy
used astrophotography gear on both
cameras i installed something called
magic lantern firmware and what that is
is it's additional firmware that you put
on the sd card and
so you just take the sd card out you put
it in your computer you add it to this
and then you can install it and it does
break your warranty
because there are certain risks with
hacking your camera a little bit
but since these are both out of warranty
and i've used magic lantern before i
wasn't so concerned about
that aspect of it but maybe you should
be so just
fair warning but the reason i'll be
using magic lantern tonight is for the
built-in intervalometer that that
adds to canon cameras and an
intervalometer is just a fancy word for
an
interval timer meaning something that
can take a programmed sequence of photos
so you could set up your camera to take
a two second photo
wait a second or two for the mirror to
settle then take another photo
and on and on like that for as long as
you set it to go so you can set it for
100 200 photos walk away from your setup
so that you're not
messing with it and tonight we're going
to do that we're going to take
hundreds of photos of the same patch of
sky and again the reason for taking
hundreds of photos is to lower the
random
noise in each shot by
stacking them together and averaging
them this is something that we called
image stacking and we'll we're going to
see that in
you know in action the processing
section of this video
anyways back to intervalometers you may
find that your camera
already has an internal intervalometer
or interval timer
that you can access through the menus a
lot of fuji panasonic cameras have those
and maybe or maybe you could add an
intervalometer with something like magic
lantern that's what i'm doing
another good option is to buy a small
external intervalometer like this one by
newer
i'll have some links in the description
if you're interested it costs about 35
dollars and most
uh dslrs or mirrorless cameras will have
the ability to just plug something like
this right in
just make sure you get the
intervalometer that's designed for your
camera
and basically all i have to do then is
just uh
program the sequence in right here on
the front using the buttons
and then when i'm ready um it's all set
up and focused i just press start on
here
it starts taking photos and i've set
this up to take a photo
every few seconds and then
on the camera i have that set to take
two second pictures
and it'll just keep taking photos for as
long as you set it to do it so i just
set it to take four photos and it just
took four
um very easy to operate and works really
well
okay another option though even cheaper
if you don't want to spend 35 dollars
is you can just get a cable release this
is like ten dollars
my key and goes into the same
port on your camera
and then what we can do is either just
you know
sit back on a chair and just take the
pictures
one by one with that or you can set your
camera on continuous
drive mode rather than single
shooting and then
just lock the cable release
and then what it'll do is there's no
delay it'll just
keep taking photos one after another
so not quite as good the reason is is
because
with the dslr the mirror is going up and
down so you might get
some vibration that way but i've
actually tested this and didn't get any
vibration in my photos but
you'll have to try it if you already
have a cable release it might be a good
option
and finally yet another option for newer
cameras is to use
apps on your smartphone to control your
camera
these 60ds that i have are too old they
don't have wifi or bluetooth
communication so i can't show that
working
but i have tried this with my newer
cameras and it can work just fine they
basically
talk with the the smartphone over wifi
or bluetooth or both
and then you can control the camera and
set up a sequence of shots
so there are many options for actually
taking the photos the thing we're trying
to avoid
is actually touching the camera's
shutter button to take the photos
so like this
the reason is is that just by pressing
it like that even if you're on a steady
tripod
you'll get some vibration shake by doing
that if that's your
only option you don't have any other way
to control the camera
then what i would recommend is just put
it on a two second delay
and almost any camera has something like
that like a timer mode
and then you press the button
and completely remove your hand and try
to stay very still while it's taking the
picture too of course because you don't
want the ground to move and that that
can work
i've tried it it's a little tedious but
it does work for the lens i'll be using
canon's nifty 50 on both
my 6pds um this is officially
their 50 millimeter f 1.8
stm lens and it's regularly 125
but it also regularly goes on sale for
about 99
new so i picked up both of my copies at
99.
um and i'll be shooting at a focal ratio
of f2
meaning the aperture is going to be
stopped down just a little bit from wide
open wide open on these is f 1.8
and the reason to stop down meaning
making the aperture
opening inside the lens smaller is
typically lenses perform a bit better
with star shape when stopped down
meaning wide open
a corner star may look a little like a
little seagull when we zoom in on it
see it's sort of messed up but stop down
a bit the stars look
more like they should little pinpoints
of light
however the trade-off of stopping down
the aperture at all is whenever you stop
down you're letting in less light
less light is hitting the sensor since
the aperture
opening is getting smaller remember the
aperture is a fraction so with each stop
on the scale
from f2 to f 2.8 to f4
you're letting in half as much light
each time you stop it down
and so if possible for this tutorial i
would shoot at f4
or wider meaning f4 f 2.8 f2 etc
but if your lens only goes as wide as
let's say f 5.6
meaning that's the smallest number the
smallest f ratio
then don't let that stop you from trying
it's just not as ideal for untracked
astrophotography since we're dealing
with such
short exposures since we're not tracking
as a quick aside
if you do have a tracker then the
so-called slower focal ratios of like f
5.6 f6
f7 those will work just fine um
because we can easily do much longer
exposures because
we're tracking so uh you basically
counteract the fact that you're not
letting in
as much light by tracking and doing a
much longer exposure
but there are limits to this like you
don't wouldn't want to do deep sky
astrophotography at something like
f22 because there's just not going to be
enough light to make that work
if you have a selection of lenses or a
zoom lens
the next thing we need to pick is the
focal length and so i would strongly
advise staying at 100 millimeters
or under so 50
80 70 all those are good if you've tried
untracked astrophotography before and
you want to experiment with some of
these higher focal lengths then go for
it
but for your first time out i think the
sweet spot of what we're trying to do
which is capturing bright deep sky
objects without tracking
is in my opinion somewhere from around
24 millimeters
uh up to 85 millimeters and the reason
is is that the shorter the focal length
the longer we can expose so we can
expose maybe for
five or six seconds at 24 millimeters
and then only two seconds at 50
millimeters let's say
um so star trails are the limiting
factor to how long we can expose for
and again star tr the reason that stars
trail is due to the earth's rotation
in the 24 to 85 millimeter range though
anywhere in there we can usually at
least do like one to two second
exposures
at a minimum and that's going to give us
some decent signal if we do
really bright dsos personally i try to
avoid going under around one second
exposures for this technique because
it's hard to overcome the noise when you
go really really short
and so and then the reason i don't
suggest
like uh going to a fisheye
or 14 millimeter lens is uh that
focal length you're you're basically
into uh
landscape astrophotography territory
where yeah it will be a you can get a
really beautiful shot of the milky way
but the any deep sky object is going to
be
really really really small on your
sensor so you're not going to resolve
much detail
when you're at 14 or 10 millimeters or
something like that
so at 24 millimeters you can start to
resolve some of the bigger bright
nebulae
um and for me uh
the the sort of really ideal is
something like 50 to 85 millimeters
because
that's sort of right in between where
you can resolve some detail
but you can also do somewhat longer
exposures like
one to two seconds for each exposure
okay and that's it for equipment now
there are
additional accessories of course there's
always more things you can do in after
photography but i'm going to try to keep
it really simple tonight
i'm not going to use a bot nav mask as i
may have mentioned in my past video
they typically don't work that well at
50 millimeters or under anyways
so we're just going to manually focus on
a star and just try to get it as small
as possible in the
live view of the camera i'm also not
going to be using anything to control
um possible dew formation on the lens
the reason i'm not going to do that
tonight is because since
the lagoon nebula is basically low on
the horizon
the lens isn't going to be pointed up
and usually when the lens is pointed
this way i don't have any
dew problems it's only when it's pointed
straight up that dew
collects on the lens but
if you are shooting something that's
straight up one really easy way to
prevent dew is just get some hand
warmers that are like
activated by shaking them and then just
rubber band them around the lens
so that's it for equipment uh
at 85 millimeters or 70 millimeters you
might optionally want to get a bodanov
mask because they really do start to
work well at that focal length
um but you don't need one
next we have to figure out where to go
shoot
and the unavoidable truth with
astrophotography is the darker the sky
you can shoot under the better your
results will be
and so you can try to work around that
fact you know i
do a lot of narrowband work so these are
really expensive filters so i can shoot
in the city
and that works pretty well but the truth
is no matter what kind of gear you buy
you still have this unavoidable issue of
light pollution and if you can get under
dark skies your results will always be
better
all that said you can definitely still
try this out if you live in the city
it's just
uh if at all possible to get somewhere
dark go for it because
it's just amazing you'll it's a better
experience and your photos will be
better
now i'll say if you're brand new to this
and you're planning
you know to spend some money on a
camping trip or something to go
try out astrophotography under dark
skies
please practice first from wherever you
live don't make it your first time
trying astrophotography on an expensive
trip
because things like focusing and using
the camera in the dark can be pretty
hard
your first time out and so if if you
practice those you'll you'll feel ready
for that big trip to the dark side
and i think you'll have a much smoother
experience
if you're not sure where to go to find
dark skies
there's a good website for trying to
estimate how dark a location will be
it's called light
pollution map.info and what it does is
it uses satellite
imagery and surveys to estimate how
light polluted the skies will be
anywhere in the world if you're new to
the night sky
it's also good to download a planetarium
app on your phone
and learn how to use it a bit before
going out
they're not hard to figure out the cool
and the cool thing about using these
apps is they make
finding stuff much easier because they
use the phone's compass and gyroscope to
tell you
exactly where in the sky your deep sky
object should be you just hold it up
you line up your camera with where it
says it should be on the phone and you
and adjust the tilt a little bit until
you find it on your camera's live view
and you've found it
and you can you can look at star
patterns and things like this to make
sure you're in the right spot
and you can even change the time in the
app so you can do some planning ahead of
time this is what i do a lot of times
i'll plan to see
when the object is going to rise how
high it's going to be in the sky
and and for example if the app says
something like oh this
deep sky object is only going to get 5
degrees off the horizon at its highest
all night
then you can forget about shooting it
that's too low um
my rule of thumb is like something like
15 degrees is as low as i'm going to go
and that's if i really have a good
horizon
the lagoon which we're shooting tonight
i'm going to put it in the lowest part
of my photo
and it's going to be about 20 to 23
degrees for a few hours
but keep in mind also that trees and can
be
buildings can be a really big hindrance
so the best kind of location
to find is one that has something called
good horizons meaning
if you look out there's no obstructions
close by like a big
field or a body of water like a lake or
the ocean
sites like this that are really good
horizons and are dark are called dark
sites
and ask around because a lot of local
astronomy clubs
you know might know where these are in
your area okay to calculate
my exposure time i use something called
the npf rule if you're interested in why
i
use this rule as opposed to something
like the rule 400 or rule 500 i've made
a whole video about that topic which you
can find on my channel
to calculate the npf rule i
use the original source calculator
so you can find this on google by
googling something like this
or i'll put the link
in the description of this video so
we're going to pull up this website it
is in french
but if you're using chrome web browser
there is a little handy
translate google translate tool right up
here so i'm just going to switch it from
french to
english and then it gives me a
an okay translation of this page so
if you're interested in how the rule
works uh there's a bunch of information
here at the top and way more at the
bottom for understanding it
but what we're going to do is we're
going to use this calculator right here
starting at where it says
camera details and if you have a newer
camera
don't try to choose anything right here
you're just going to enter in your
information
manually and the way to find this
information
manually is just to
again google and google the name of your
camera so i'll do
canon eos r
and then do a pixel
size
and often the first thing that will come
up is this
digicamdatabase.com and i have found
this is a good
source for this information and so here
where it says pixel pitch
5.34 microns that's what i would put in
right here
and then for number of pixels in width
and height
i think you usually have to
scroll down a little bit on this page on
the digicam database
till you get to sensor resolution
and then the first number is always the
width
so 6741
and the second number is the height
okay so it's it's that simple just
google
google your camera name plus uh pixel
size and usually the first
um thing that will come up is a handy
website like this one
digicam database that will allow you to
find all that information and put it in
manually now if you have an older camera
like me
instead what you can do is just choose
the uh the make
and the model right from this list and
it will fill in the information
for you everyone i think is going to be
dealing with
a color uh sensor so just leave that
alone
if you have one of these kinds of
sensors you would already know and you
can
choose that for the focal length we're
doing 50 millimeters
and f2
okay um this is
marginally important it really it really
matters if you're shooting directly
north then you can often get very much
longer exposure times because
you're closer to the north star or if
you're in the southern hemisphere
directly south but for other things it
doesn't matter so much but
we'll use it anyways um we're going to
be shooting towards the southeast where
the milky way will be
and the latitude of our shooting
location
is let's say 46 degrees
and the target height above the horizon
i said was
23 degrees if you don't know these
things just
guesstimate you can use your planetarium
application to try to figure them out
okay go ahead and click calculate the
exposure time
and then just scroll down to this yellow
box and the information that we want is
in this uh
grid of nine squares you can see that
for
my camera it's telling me two seconds
you know on this corner maybe we could
get away with 2.1 seconds but
if you if you get a something like 2.5
or something like that
just always round down so because
usually a camera can't do
uh something like 2.5 anyways so you're
just going to be rounding down anyways
so
we've figured out our exposure time is
two seconds
it does compare that to other rules here
a simplified mpf rule a rule of 500 and
a rule
of 500 with equivalent
focal length oh by the way uh this
equivalent focal length thing reminded
me
a lot of people have asked me should i
try to figure out the equivalent focal
length when i enter in my focal length
here
no so even though i am using a crop
sensor camera
i'm not going to change my focal length
here
because this calculator calculates
everything it takes everything into
account you don't have to go ahead and
try to figure out an effective focal
length
just put in whatever the lens says on it
right there
and put in the information as accurately
as you can and this will be
the answer this will be the max exposure
time we can get
until stars start to
streak or get out of round all right the
last thing to do
before leaving the house is just to make
sure all your gear is ready to go
and that means charging your camera
battery
to full if you have an extra battery
charge that one to full
two um if you
will get into this but it make sure you
have a good memory card you format it so
that
it's ready to go you have plenty of
space you can also bring an extra
memory card i'm really into extras of
everything so
don't feel like you have to buy extras
of everything but it's just how i
am i always have extras
we also want to make sure that our
camera is on all the right
settings before we leave and so let's go
through all the menus on this
canon 60d and make sure
set up for deep sky astrophotography but
if you have a different brand and
you know then things will be a little
bit different than this nikon's a little
bit different sony's a little bit
different but
if you don't see a particular setting
don't worry about it
just follow along as much as you can and
it should work out fine
there's really you know only a few
really important settings and i'll i'll
definitely highlight those as we go
through okay i'm going to start in the
quick menu here which you just get by
pressing q
on a canon camera and most
dslrs have some kind of quick menu like
this and i'm going to set
the aperture the shutter speed and the
iso
i'm not going to set them to the values
i think i'm actually going to use for
shooting which would be
something like f2 iso 1600
and i think we found out two seconds
instead i'm going to set them a little
bit more aggressive
which i use for framing so just for
finding my object i want to go as fast
an aperture as possible i want to go a
little bit more aggressive on the
shutter speeds a little bit longer
exposure
and i usually pick a higher iso
and this just allows me to see the image
a little bit
clearer to see if i have it framed up if
i actually
have it framed up on the milky way as i
want and then
when i'm ready to shoot i change these
values back to what i actually want
to take my hundreds of pictures with to
get round stars and things
like that okay so again
just set these a little bit more
aggressively than you would normally
a little bit higher iso a little bit
faster
f-stop and longer exposure and then you
can dial them back to what you want
after you've found your object
the other thing that i do in the quick
menu is instead of having it on single
shooting
i always put it on two second timer i
find that really useful when i'm trying
to find my object because then i don't
have to
hassle with an intervalometer or
anything else i can just
take a two second delayed picture so
it's it's
it's going to be sharp because i'm not
actually hitting the shutter button it
takes the picture immediately it waits
two seconds before taking the picture
and that way i can get a sharp exposure
that lets me know if i'm in the right
area
and how focus is and things like that
other thing i can set in here we could
also set this in the main menu
is how i wanted to take the pictures so
right now it's set to raw plus jpeg
i actually don't need a jpeg i just need
the raw so i'm just going to
turn off the jpeg option there and just
get raw frames
if you forget everything else just
always make sure before you go out to
set your
dslr or mirrorless camera to raw you
it's much better and you can actually
calibrate your files if they're in raw
mode
if they're not it's it applies a
transformation
inside the camera and you won't be able
to properly calibrate with darks flats
and bias
also in here we have our white balance
mode i always just put this
on daylight for astrophotography
it doesn't really matter since we are
shooting raw we can always we're always
going to change the white balance
after the fact in post-processing but
just as a habit i always put mine
on daylight
everything else is looking pretty good
here
let's go ahead and go to the big menu
now so i'm just going to hit the menu
key
okay we already set our quality but just
to show you you can also set it in there
so we have it set to raw i always turn
off
any kind of sounds just because i find
them annoying at night
to deal with beeps and things
i also turn off the image review
this can be handy when you're framing
but i find it's just as easy just to go
into playback mode then i can look at
the histogram and things like that in
playback mode
and the problem with having image review
on is once you actually start taking
your pictures
it will turn on that screen every few
seconds and that can really heat up the
camera
and drain the battery and do other bad
things so we don't want that
i'm going to turn it off
most of these settings are not really
don't really have anything to do with
astrophotography and will not have no
impact basically
things like picture style are just for
the jpeg transformation so you don't
have to worry about it
like i said white balance doesn't really
matter too much if you're
going to do a processing like we're
doing color space again that only
applies to the
jpeg transformation and won't be an
issue for raw files
sometimes uh oh so yeah sometimes uh
you'll see
an option in these menus it's not on
this canon 60d because it's too old but
for
um something related to iso like a like
an iso
noise reduction or some kind of noise
reduction
option if you have if your camera has
that i would recommend turning it off i
know that sounds sort of
counter-intuitive we want to reduce
noise but
it messes with calibration and
calibration is how we're going to
really reduce a lot of unwanted noise so
i would turn any kind of noise reduction
option off if your camera has it
live view shooting we want enabled and
we do want exposure simulation enabled
too that just makes the
the picture brighter in the live view
okay these are mostly about playback the
one thing that i want to point out here
in the playback mode
is this histogram option so you can set
your histogram and playback to
brightness or rgb
both are really useful for evaluating
exposure overall i usually just leave it
on brightness
but sometimes it is really helpful to go
into the rgb
histograms and see where your different
channels lie
because a lot of times you want to at
least get your
weakest channel which is usually red off
of the noise floor
meaning off of the very left hand side
of the histogram
this is more applicable though to
tracked astrophotography so
it doesn't really matter for us too much
okay uh auto power off i usually
set this to something really high or
even just disable it entirely
i'll just set it to 30 minutes because
when i'm working i don't want to have to
deal with
auto power off auto rotate
i turn this off and i would recommend
everyone do that because
i have seen with the stacking programs
auto rotate
somehow getting interpreted and messing
up the stacking
so i would turn it off um
format so this is where you can format
your card i'm not going to do that right
now because i'm not sure what's on this
but
i do recommend it just to make sure you
have enough
room so go to you know back up your
entire sd card and then format it before
you go out
and it's always best to format it in the
camera uh to for the best results rather
than
you know erasing things on the computer
i always format on the camera
to get a very clean starting point
okay i usually turn my lcd brightness up
uh all the way when i'm
it's really useful for when you're
framing objects when you're trying to
understand
you know do i have it in frame that to
have that lcd brightness high
then after you've found your object you
can go back in here and turn it back
down
if you remember because it does save on
battery to turn the lcd brightness down
and can also
help with your night vision date and
time it's very important
i think to set the correct date and time
because later on you're going to want to
remember when did i take those files and
you know i sort of remember i took some
files of the lagoon on
august 3rd but if that date time is set
wrong then you don't know when you took
them and it's not as helpful
okay sensor cleaning
this one can be good to have the auto
cleaning
but what i usually do is actually
before i start doing any
astrophotography i do the auto
cleaning on the sensor
and then i turn auto cleaning off
the reason for that is that um if for
some reason you have to change a battery
or something like that
and you put the battery back in you
power your camera back on it does the
auto cleaning
you know automatically when you're
turning the camera off and on
and if you haven't done your flats yet
then the auto cleaning
cans can mess up the dust particles on
your sensor
and then your flats won't match your
lights so i always just i always do a
cleaning and then
disable the sensor cleaning property
that's how i get around that
okay i think we've reached the end here
of the options that matter
so that's it we've gone through all of
the different
camera options and set them up for
astrophotography
all right tonight we're going to see how
a stock dslr compares to a full spectrum
dslr these are both canon 60ds but one
has been modified for astrophotography
and we're going to be shooting ha
emission nebulae that's where it really
makes a difference between
modifying your dslr versus having a
stock dslr
and so if you've been wondering does it
make sense for me to modify my dslr
this little test should help because
we're going to be using the same lens
same camera body the only difference
here is that one is modified and one is
not
okay it's starting to get dark but it's
not quite dark enough to start
shooting our lights yet meaning our
pictures in the night sky
but we can start shooting our
calibration frames because i think the
temperature is stabilized
and so i'm going to start with my bias
frames
and to shoot bias frames what you're
going to want to do is
cover the lens so that it's uh
completely
dark so i'm just going to put my lens
cap on and it's just pointed at you know
the dark sky and then i'm going to
uh set my shutter speed to
the fastest it can go so for this camera
that's 1/8000 of a second for some
cameras that might be
like 1/4000 of a second but just set it
to as fast as it can go
and i'm going to do everything at iso
1600 i have found that's a good iso
value for
this camera okay
and then i just want to take a bunch of
these so i could either
just set up an intervalometer or what i
usually do since
camera shake and things like that aren't
going to matter is i just put it onto
continuous shooting mode and just hold
down the trigger
for a while so that i can take 100
or so if you don't
want to do it that way though you can
always use your intervalometer
okay and then i'm going to take my dark
frames
which should be the same exposure length
as my lights
and i know from the npf rule that we're
going to do two second lights tonight
so i'm just going to set this to two
seconds
keep the lens cap on the lens so that
we're taking these
in complete darkness keep the iso the
same
and then i'm just going to take about 30
or 50 of these
i'll use my intervalometer again
okay and for my last type of calibration
frame here these are flats
and what i'm going to do is i'm going to
take this led
tracing panel that i bought for about 30
off of
amazon and i'm going to put it on top of
the lens here with the camera pointed
straight
up but before i put it on i have this
sort of
tracing paper diffusion material on
attached to the lens with a rubber band
you can also use a clean white
t-shirt to do the same thing basically
the diffusion is just so that we can get
slightly longer exposures
and avoid any uh banding issues
okay and then the way i'm going to take
these i've just put the camera into
live view mode and i'm looking at the
screen here
and i can see that two seconds is way
too bright because when i hold the
shutter button down halfway it tells me
that's
over three stops overexposed so i'm
going to bring this down to
let's try 1 8 of a second still
overexposed
okay and i'm just looking at that little
meter down at the bottom
now at 1 15 of a second we're about one
and a half stops overexposed
okay if i bring it down to i'm going to
say it's somewhere around here
1/40th or 1/50th of a second looks about
right
let's try 1/50th of a second
i know you can see some some very quick
banding
there that's that's fine i think that
1/50th of a second is going to be long
enough
to avoid it but we'll see it's going to
go ahead and take a picture
and i'm going to press
info button and you can see
there is our histogram mountain
and you can see that it is about one
third of the way over
so that looks good um
i usually err on the side of a little
bit
under exposed flat rather than
overexposed
right in the middle is fine too but a
little bit underexposed has always
worked for me as long as you're
you know seeing the entire histogram
mountain it's not clipped on
either side and it's at least a quarter
of the way over on the histogram usually
that kind of flat will work fine the
other thing that i'm looking for
here is that uh
if i click the info button again that
all three color channels are represented
so you can see that in the rgb histogram
there
and if i look at it that i'm not seeing
any banding issues
that happen sometimes when you take a
short flat like this
and what those would look like is
horizontal
dark lines across the frame i don't see
any banding issues but i'll probably
take a few more flats just to make sure
that they don't pop up
and then if i'm happy with this i'll go
ahead and take about
30 to 40 flats
okay it's now time to focus usually i
focus on a bright star in the sky but
since jupiter is out and that's a
brighter than any star i thought it
would be
good for this example just because it's
so bright that we'll be able to really
see it easily in the video and so
uh even though it's not a point source
it it should work okay for
this example and basically what we're
trying to do is just make
the star as small on the screen as
possible
and using manual focus so you put it
onto manual focus mode on your lens if
there's a switch
and then you'll just use the focus ring
back and forth
until you find that spot where the star
is the smallest it can be
and usually this takes a little bit of
trial and error and i've found that on a
bright star
when you get it to the smallest focus
point usually you see a little chromatic
aberration a little bit of
pink magenta tone around the star and
the other thing to look for is smaller
stars should all of a sudden just
pop out so basically when you really get
into focus you'll see these little small
stars just sort of pop out of nowhere
and with jupiter you can really see it
here because jupiter's moons are really
not visible
until we get into focus and then all of
a sudden you see that little
those two little moons right to the side
of jupiter here
okay now it's time to point our camera
at our deep sky object
the lagoon nebula is also known as m20
from sca20
and so i'm just using the free
application sky map here on my android
phone
to find where it is i'm just holding it
up in front of the sky and i can see it
should be in this direction so i'm going
to point my camera in that direction
and then just use the live view to
find it all right i've now
found uh the milky way and the lagoon
nebula
and uh so so i'm gonna go ahead and take
a test picture
there we go um i can see the milky way
there
uh it's a little bit cloudy still but
hopefully those go away
let me zoom in here so i can show you
where the lagoon is in this
the lagoon is pretty easy to spot
because even in this
three second test picture we can see
some nebulosity
and then we can also see the nice
cluster of stars in the lagoon core
there
so this is looking pretty good but i'm
going to go down to two seconds to make
sure that i have pinpoint stars
i'm going to go here into my quick menu
and actually set this
up for um shooting
so iso 3200 is a little too high i'm
going to bring that back down to iso
1600
i have a rule of thumb that for older
canon cameras like this
i always pick either 800 or 1600 and
for untracked astrophotography like this
i always go with sixteen hundred
i'm not going to get into the reasons
why but that's what i do for
these cameras
for the shutter speed we found from the
npf rule that for this camera and
this 50 millimeter lens we want two
second sub exposures so that's what i'm
going to set it to
and for the aperture before i said i was
going to go with f/2 but i've changed my
mind
last minute here and i'm going to go
wide open at f/1.8
the reason is is just because from this
dark side i think that i need as much
light as i can get and just looking at
some of my test shots here
uh i'm comfortable with f 1.8 i'll
accept the sort of
weird stars on the edge which i'm going
to crop away anyways
so
okay so that's it we've set our shutter
speed our aperture
and the iso correctly last thing i'm
going to do here i'm going to
turn off the self timer set it to single
shooting
okay if you have an external
intervalometer you would now be ready to
program
that and start your sequence that way
since i'm using an internal
intervalometer
via magic lantern i'm just going to hit
the trash button on my canon camera here
and to enter the magic lantern menu
system and i'm just going to go
over here to the intervalometer option
turn that on press q
to set the options i actually wanted to
take a picture
every three seconds because i want to
give a little bit of time
for the mirror to open and close
and not cause vibration issues i should
say possible vibration issues i've never
really seen them
um i'll start the trigger meaning start
the sequence after i leave the menu
and i want it to start after
12 seconds because i want to give plenty
of time for me to
sit back and get away from the camera
and not stomp around too much
and i'm going to
do
150 shots and then at that point i'm
going to
check focus reframe that kind of thing
um i've had a lot of questions about
what to set this to how do you know how
long you should go
before you reframe um it's really sort
of
a guess an educated guess
you don't want to let it go too long
because then you know your
your main subject will be get too off
center and you'll have to do so much
cropping
in post but you also you know
want to give it a good run before you
have to constantly be checking it
so i usually do something like a 100 to
200 or something like that and that's
with
these low focal lengths like 50
millimeters if you're
shooting at something like 200
millimeters untracked then
you would want to set this much lower
set it like 30 or 40 and reframe
more consistently through the night so
that you don't have to crop
so much because you know the more zoomed
in you are basically the more you're
going to have to
reframe to keep your object centered on
screen
okay that's good take a picture every
three seconds
start the trigger after leaving the menu
and start after
12 seconds okay take 150 shots
okay that's it we can now hit the trash
button again to leave the magic lantern
menu and it'll start the
sequence
okay so we're back inside and the first
thing we have to do
to actually start uh processing our
files
is actually get them onto the computer
organized
and i'm actually going to start with the
camera
because in playback mode on the camera
it's really easy
to actually understand which files are
which because
um most cameras have an info button
that then gives you some metadata about
the file
uh in playback mode and uh
that way i can just quickly see not only
visually what kind of file it is so
obviously the ones with stars will be
lights and the ones that's all
bright like this is a flat but when it
comes to the files that are completely
black like bias and darks it's hard to
differentiate those without the metadata
so looking in the upper left hand corner
here it tells us the shutter speed
and so a dark would have a shutter speed
that's the same as the light
two two seconds while a bias frame would
have a shutter speed
that's 1 8 000 of a second which is the
fastest
shutter speed this camera can do so what
i'm going to do now is i'm just going to
open up
notepad on my windows computer here
there's also a program called text edit
on mac both of these are just quick
note-taking
applications and i'm going to type in
lights
darks bias flats because that's the
order that i took these files
in and i'm just going to take note here
of the file names the range
of each type so we can see the first
light here
is ends in 831
the file name so i'm just going to type
in 831
dash and then i'm going to press the
zoom out button
and just use my scroll wheel here
to scroll down
until we see something that doesn't look
like a light frame meaning we don't see
the milky way anymore
it'll turn probably completely black
eventually
took a lot of light frames there we go
okay so you can see starting with 1 1
3 5 this is a completely black
frame and because it's two seconds i
know that it's a dark so
the the last uh light frame is
one one one two and then i guess i
deleted some
files probably because the
clouds came in and then the first dark
frame
is one one three
five okay now i'll just keep scrolling
until up there in the upper left hand
side of the screen
it changes from 2 seconds
to 1 8 000 of a second and then i know
this is my last dark frame
so one one eight zero and my first
bias frame is one one eight one okay and
then i'll just keep scrolling
until we get to the flats looks like i
took about a hundred bias frames
there we go
1280 is the last bias frame
and then my first flat frame is 14
37. i know that's a a huge jump there in
numbers um
i deleted some things from the card just
to make this a little bit uh easier
so then i'll just keep scrolling whoops
and my last flat frame is one four
six five okay so now i have everything
all the information that i need to
organize these files because i have the
file names
and the numbers here and what type of
file they are
and so now what i can do is i can just
remove the memory card
from the camera
and take my memory card reader here
and this is a nice usb 3 memory card
reader that's
nice and fast for transferring the files
to the computer
it's made by kingston and it also has
slots for other type of memory cards
if you have a camera with
cf or something else
okay and it says blah blah blah i don't
care it opens up that in the file
explorer if you're on mac this would be
finder and if it if it does if your
memory card opens up in some other
program
some photos application just close out
of that we don't need it
what we're going to do now with this
window open over here
and our notepad file here is we're going
to
copy the files off of the memory card
onto the computer
but before we do that let's make some
empty folders
to transfer them to so i'm going to make
a new folder on the desktop
just right click and choose new folder
i'll call this
lagoon and then inside my lagoon folder
i'm going to make four
subfolders just the same way right click
new folder
and i'm going to make one for lights
one for darks
one for bias
and one for flats
okay now with these two windows open
here's my memory card i'm going to go in
here into my picture files
and here's my empty folders on my
desktop
i'm going to start with lights and so
lights go from 831 to 1112
so i'm going to open up my lights folder
over here on my memory card i'm going to
click on the first file 831
and scroll down until i get to
1 1 1 2. there it is
and hold down shift and click and so
shift click makes it so you can grab the
whole list of files
then i'll just left-click and drag to
drag these
282 files over to my lights folder and
let go
and it copies them
okay the copying is done so now i'm
going to go back a folder just by
clicking on lagoon
and next i'll go into darks
so i'll click on the darks folder it
says the folder is empty
then i'll just copy over from 1135
to 1180. so
click once on 11 35 scroll down
shift click on 1180 copy those to my
darks folder
well that's going i can look the next
it's bias 1181-1280
so open up my bias folder
click on 1181 scroll down to
1280 shift click
and click and drag 100 bias files
okay and then finally flats is
everything else here
so we'll just copy those over to the
flats folder
and then we'll be done
okay all done the only other thing i
want to say about
file organization here is
uh that if you are using deep sky
stacker
um when it stacks together all of these
bias frames to make a master bias it
leaves that master bias file
uh in this folder so if you have
a previous project that you worked on
and you still um have all of these
folders look in your bias folder there's
a master bios
file in there then you can reuse for
project after
project you don't have to take the bias
frames all over again and restack them
you can save some time just by
reusing a master bias file so that's why
i shot a hundred bias frames just to get
a really good
master bias file and then we don't have
to actually shoot those bias frames
again
we can reuse that master bias file over
and over again
okay i'll close out of this stuff and
now let's go ahead
and open up deep sky stacker here
okay this is deep sky stacker 4.2.3 the
64-bit version the first thing i'm going
to do here is go down here to settings
and go to stacking settings
and right here where it says temporary
file
files where it says temporary files
folder
you can see that i have mine set up to
an external drive the d
drive which is just a an external hard
drive i have connected
but yours might be on the local
drive and that's fine as long as you
have plenty of hard drive space but
if you don't for some reason i would
recommend setting this up
to where you want it to go where you
have plenty of space because these temp
files can get
really really big like since we're
stacking
hundreds and hundreds of frames these
these temp files can get up to like
60 gigabytes now they are temp files
meaning they're temporary they only are
are there when you have the program open
and then when you close the program
they're deleted from your hard drive
but still you need the space so if
you're working off a fairly small like
startup drive like an ssd
you may want to pick a different
location for this temporary files folder
like i did
okay with that said we can now open up
our picture files this means our
lights and so i'm just going to navigate
here to the desktop
and then to my lagoon folder
into my lights subfolder and i'll just
click on any of them and then press
control a to select all and click open
okay it brings them in for some reason
deep skystacker has this quirk where i
think it's because you could just bring
in
all of your frames all at once and it
let it try to figure out
which are your light dark and flat and
biased but i really wouldn't recommend
that because it might
mess something up so what i usually do
is i just bring in my light frames first
but none of them are checked right now
so then i go over here and just click
check all okay then it tells me i have
282
light frames okay then i can click over
here
on the left hand side under open picture
files where it says
dark files just go to my darks
folder and again click press control
a and open up all my dark files
and it tells me i have 46 of those
then i'll open up my flat files
open those 29 and finally my bias files
open okay we're not using dark flats
uh you usually only need to use dark
flats if you're shooting really really
long flats like 30 seconds or something
like that
if you're using a slow scope or
something like that uh
but we we shot very quick flat so we're
i'm not worried about dark current noise
and we don't need to correct
the flats with dark flats anyways uh we
have all of this set up now
um we can now go on
to this red
highlighted thing down here that says
register checked pictures
okay um
let's start with the main
window here under actions so we have
register
already registered pictures these are
not already registered so we can leave
that unchecked
we have automatic detection of hot
pixels it's fine to leave that checked
we have stack after registering i'm
going to go ahead and check that
i want to just do this all in one
process sometimes you break it up and
you might want to register
first and then look at the scores and do
different things with that but
let's just keep this simple and stack
after registering
i have 282 frames so i'm going to tell
it
to select the best 95 percent of
pictures and stack those so it's gonna
throw out the worst of the five
the worst five percent of the pictures
which i'm fine with
i think there's some which have maybe
some passing clouds or some where maybe
i'm
i'm reframing and the stars are are
are streaked and it deep sky stacker
will do a good job of finding those
kinds of things and throwing them out
because they won't be considered in the
best 95 percent
okay i'm going to go over here to
advanced and just make sure that
my star detection threshold is okay i
don't remember what the default is but
let's just start at 20
and then press compute the number of
stars
and it found 117 if i bring that
star detection threshold down like that
you can see that it finds slightly more
stars
and if i bring it up
it will find fewer stars so at 36
percent it's only finding 59 stars which
might work probably would work but i
usually like to get over 100 stars
so i'm going to bring that back over to
17
and that gives me 147 stars
as long as you're seeing like something
between
let's say 50 and
3 000 stars it's probably gonna work
just fine
if you're seeing like twenty 000 stars
or
zero stars then those are outliers and i
think something is going wrong so then
you would really want to examine your
files
especially the zero stars that would
mean that
you probably didn't get focus right
because if it's not finding any stars
then then it's not going to be able to
stack your pictures
so then you're going to have to take a
look at your files
you could open them up in photoshop or
something like that ahead of time
and see what the issue is but usually
this works just fine
and you might even be able to just leave
it on the default but i always like to
check it okay and then i'm going to
click on
recommended settings and what i like to
do in here is just sort of scroll
through and see if there is anything
that is popping up in red that usually
indicates this is something you should
address
i mean it says you are stacking 282
light frames here that's sort of
in red but i mean where you're seeing
all these green statements
what the green indicates is that those
are settings that it
considers um already
set and that are appropriate
if you're seeing something in red
then that means something that you
haven't set or that you maybe should
pay attention to before you start the
process
but for the most part the default values
in deep sky stacker
work pretty well if we go into
stacking parameters
there are some different options in here
standard mode mosaic
mode intersection mode you definitely
don't want mosaic mode that would mean
that you get
that's for if you are basically taking a
mosaic of the night sky
we also can think of this as a panorama
something like that where you're
you're putting together a bunch of
different pictures to make a bigger
picture of the night sky
but what we want to do is actually stack
the pictures all together
um to to average out the noise in the
picture
and for that you can either use standard
mode or intersection mode
basically the difference is just that
standard mode isn't going to
crop away anything it's going to leave
in the rough edges
and intersection mode will automatically
apply a crop
but i don't necessarily trust it so i
always just leave this on standard mode
and do the cropping myself
afterwards
okay you want to use all available
processors down here at the bottom don't
want to turn
on any drizzle or a lining of rgb
channels
usually
this thing you know the different
clipping modes work just fine
in the defaults i have the lights on
kappa sigma clipping with a cap of two
and then darks flats and bias are all on
median kappa sigma clipping
i have alignment set to automatic
the intermediate files this is sort of
interesting you can either choose otif
or fit so that if you were working with
other
astronomy programs you might choose fits
which is the more standard for astronomy
programs but
since we're going to be working mostly
with just deep sky stacker in photoshop
tiff files are just fine
this is interesting um if you are
finding that
even with your calibration frames your
darks are mostly supposed
are the ones that are really supposed to
take care of hot pixels but if you find
that
you stack and you calibrate and stack
and everything and then
your result still has a lot of hot
pixels you might want to try this
cosmetic correction right here where it
can try to detect the hot pixels that
are remaining automatically and
change the value of those so they're not
as noticeable
okay we want to create an output file
the autosave.tiff is fine
so basically my point here is that i'm
just using all of the defaults
i'm on standard mode for result and i'm
going to go ahead and click ok
and click ok again
and it gives us a final um summary
of everything that uh
we've told it here
um you can see that i did 200 i have 282
light frames at iso 1600
you can see my bias darks and flats are
also all at ios
iso 1600 because we have 282 light
frames
at two seconds each that's a total
exposure turtle integration of 9 minutes
24 seconds
and the process will temporarily use
31.2 gigabytes
on the d drive so you can imagine if we
instead had
over 500 frames this may take up
something like 60 gigabytes so you can
see these temporary files really do
add up so just make sure you have enough
space
before you start i don't think it will
actually let you start the process
if you don't have enough space
but remember if you if you want to set
that temporary drive to some other place
just go down here to settings and
you can you can set that temporary drive
wherever you wish
okay this all looks fine i'm going to go
ahead and click ok again
and now it's the waiting game basically
this
can take hours it really just depends on
how modern your computer's
processor is how many threads it has
that kind of thing
i don't believe deep sky stacker
has any gpu acceleration so it's really
just using your cpu
and the really again the most important
thing is uh
is just if it's a more modern more
powerful processor
this will go faster i'm just using um
a lenovo thinkpad it's a few years old
so i know this is going to take my
computer
hours to finish but that's fine i'll
sometimes you know
take a break and do something else or
leave it overnight and then
pick it up in the morning so
i'm going to fast forward or skip this
part of the video
and we'll see what it looks like when
it's all done
okay it did take a few hours i actually
just
waited overnight and this is the next
morning and we have a finished
picture here this has been calibrated
registered and stacked
now it doesn't look like much right now
but this is completely normal this is
actually what you want to see
you don't want it to look bright at this
point you want it to look black with
only a few
white dots this is because it's
unstretched or in a linear
form still and then we're going to do
the stretching and all of the
linear to non-linear curve work not here
in deep sky stacker which is a fairly
crude way to do it but in
another program like gimp or photoshop
or etc
so to it actually is already saved
so if you look right up here it tells
you where it's saved so it's saved in my
lights folder
as autosave.tiff the only issue with
this autosave.tiff file is that it is a
32-bit floating point file
and some programs i know gimp
and even some versions of photoshop
won't play well with that 32-bit file
so what i would recommend you do just to
make sure that you have
compatibility with the programs we'll
use next is go over here to the
processing
section on the left hand side and go
down to save
picture to file and this lets you save
off a 16 bit
tiff file 16 bits per channel which is
what we want
the default settings here are the ones
you want compression set to none and
under options
you want embed adjustments in the saved
image
but do not apply them you want that
checked
and so then i'll just save it as lagoon
dss for deep sky stacker and click
save and then we can see here on my
desktop
this is what i'm going to bring in to
the next program lagoon
dss.tiff and then
while we're here i'll just mention
really briefly if you do want to reuse
your master bias frame in
future projects what you can do is in
that folder
at the bottom you should see something
called master offset
iso whatever.tiff and this is what you
would
save to reuse um
and you don't have to reshoot bias
frames because they're technically the
same
every time as long as you shot them
correctly
okay that's it for deep sky stacker
we'll move on to the next
section which is the fun creative part
of
processing and really bringing this data
to life
okay i've switched over to my mac just
because that's where i have photoshop
installed
and then i transferred the resulting
16-bit tiff file from
deep sky stacker to my mac and then i'm
just going to open up
photoshop i have photoshop cs6
mainly just because i haven't bought
creative cloud or don't want to pay the
monthly subscription
and cs6 works fine for everything that i
do
but there's a few things that i'll
mention here that are a little bit
different and the main one
is that under filter there
is no adobe camera raw option under
filter in cs6 so when we get to the very
end and i'm going to do some noise
reduction in adobe camera raw
i'll show you how to get around that if
you do use an older version
like me okay let's go ahead and open up
the tiff file
and the first thing i'm going to do is
i'm just going to go up here to the
image menu
and go to mode and just confirm that it
is rgb
and 16 bits per channel if you did bring
in the autosave.tiff and you were saying
seeing 32 bits per channel what you can
do is you could just switch it to 16
bits
and then it would say something like are
you sure
proceed and you just click proceed and
it works fine
okay um so this is exactly how it looked
in deep sky stacker the first thing
we're going to do in photoshop is we're
going to duplicate the layer
so i'm just going to right click on the
background layer and choose duplicate
layer
and i'll call this first stretch
and i always like to duplicate just so i
have a backup in case i want to
just quickly check my work or or do
something with this
original background layer later on in
the process
we probably won't but just in case i
like to have it there
okay so with the first stretch layer
active let's go ahead and bring up
our image adjustments levels command
and you can see when you go into a menu
in photoshop it does give you the
shortcut
right there so since i'm on a mac the
shortcut for
levels is command l but if you were on a
windows computer it would be control
l so from now on out i'll probably just
use the keyboard shortcut
but you can also get it from the menu
right there
okay the other thing i'm going to do in
addition to bringing up levels is i want
to bring up my histograms
and if you don't see the little
histograms icon over here
you can just go to window and turn it on
from here we just want to change the
channels
option from rgb
to colors so that we see the different
colors red green and blue here and we
see them
up here in a color display and the first
thing i'm going to do is i'm just going
to
apply a pretty gentle stretch just to
the entire image to
all three channels the r g and b red
green and blue
something like that
and click ok and now you can see
uh you can see a little bit more of the
image and you can see these red green
and blue
channels come out a little bit and we
can see that they're a little bit
misaligned
but if we do that one more time it will
become even more apparent
both in the image down here which is
looking very teal
and up here you can see that our green
and blue channels are pretty aligned but
our red channel is lagging behind
here and that's why the image takes on
this sort of
greenish blue off-colored color balance
and so there's a lot of different ways
to approach color balance in photoshop
but if you want to do it while
stretching the image what you can do is
just go here and into the channels
and just pick a particular channel in
the levels command
and stretch it separately from the
others
and the reason that i like to have this
display up
is because then i can see when i'm
getting
close with the histograms to a sort of
equalized color balance where the three
channels are pretty aligned so
that's looking pretty close both here in
the histogram display
and here in the image while i have this
open it looks like the blue channel is a
little bit skinnier than the green and
the red
so another thing i can do here is i can
go into the blue and i can hit
both the mid tone slider and the shadow
slider
bring the shadow slider into the right
and the mid towed slider into the left
and that will in effect stretch out the
blue channel
and i just keep going with that
until it seems about as stretched out as
the red
and the green okay i'm going to go ahead
and click ok
and there is this little
line of red over here and up here that's
why we're seeing that
that red streak in the shadows area over
here i believe
so we can ignore that but other
otherwise when we look at these three
histogram spikes they look pretty well
aligned
and if we zoom in we can see that the
color balance is looking
pretty good here's an orange star blue
star
that kind of thing at this point
i think i want to do a few things i want
to
crop and i also want to
apply some saturation boosting so i can
really see what i have here
so i'm first going to i think just apply
a adjustment layer the huge saturation
adjustment layer and i'm going to really
bring up the saturation in the image
just like that
not that far but maybe up to
70. and this isn't permanent i know it
looks sort of weird
but it's really just to see
how our color balance is doing and where
many
where any problems may be and also where
i want to crop
where it seems like it really drops off
in terms of image quality
because of the stacking and what i mean
by that is because
we didn't have a tracking mount so we
were realigning
this but obviously i didn't do a perfect
job
and so there's going to be a lot that we
have to cut away out of the frame
by cropping where
we didn't have overlapping pictures
there's a lot more noise and that's
where we get these
registration artifacts as well okay so
let's go ahead and
crop i'm just going to press c for crop
or over here in the toolbar you can just
click on the crop icon
and so i don't want any of this over
here on the left hand side
i also want to get rid of these cropping
artifacts on the top
but i don't want to cut off the eagle
nebula which is right there
i'm going to be careful not to crop that
out i'm going to crop
in a little bit on this side as well
and the other nice thing about cropping
it really focuses in on the actually
interesting part of the photograph for
me which is the dark structure in the
milky way and the nebulae
okay so i'm going to go ahead and accept
that crop
and we can see the main issue with color
balance after i
increase the saturation is still that it
is
too um green and blue
so let's go back to our first stretch
here
and look what looks let's look at the
histograms
with that huge saturation slider applied
we can see
it really separated out again the green
and the blue
and the red so let's go ahead and
correct that again with levels
i'm going to do that by stretching the
red
not that much
but when i stretch the red you can see
it's now quite a bit fatter than the
green and the blue so i'm going to have
to stretch them a little bit too
okay i'm just going to look at the image
here and see what i
think i think that's looking pretty good
and keep in mind with with something
like the milky way where it's filling so
much of the frame it might be
natural actually for the red to be a
little bit wider than the green and the
blue because there's so much
sort of brownish reddish
milky way stars which are are much more
sort of
yellow and gold and orange and red than
blue
so i'm going to say that is good for now
and if i take back off that stretch you
can see that's before that's after
so it looks very desaturated without
this uh saturation adjustment
but what we could do now is we could go
back into this
and bring this back down to something
like
35 for now and then i'm just going to do
some more adjustment layers here so i'm
going to bring
up a
curves adjustment layer and i'm going to
do something like
this just so we can see the picture a
little bit more this is just a slight
s curve i don't want to
go too far with bringing up the
highlights because i don't want to blow
out my stars
okay with that done i can go back here
into huge slash saturation
and see if i increase this a little bit
okay this is looking pretty good at
least in terms of the stars
i'm not quite happy with the how the
milky way looks yet but we're gonna
we're gonna keep working on that
um so i'm gonna i'm gonna do a little
bit more color balancing here
um just to taste basically so i'm gonna
open up a color balance adjustment layer
and i'm going to um take out
just a little bit of green
and a little bit of blue
and a little bit of cyan so i'm
basically making the picture
warmer then i'll go back
into my curves adjustment layer and
continue sort of fiddling with this
you can see with the pictures sort of
coming alive so here's
uh before with just the stretch
it's very uh dull and then
here's as we're adding um these
saturation layers and these curves
layers and things like that
we can also i sometimes just add a
little bit
of saturation directly to
the stretch layer so we can go to
adjustments and add it here
i usually don't want to overdo it here
this is because this is a permanent
change to that layer
but i think that sometimes helps bring
it alive a little bit we can turn that
off and on and see that was before
that's after and just it just makes the
picture pop a little bit more
okay um i'm going to actually
add another curves adjustment
and probably in my final image i'm going
to want to make this darker but for now
i'm just going to actually just
make it brighter to bring out
some of this detail a little bit more
okay
now at this point i am pretty happy with
this
star color and i don't want to
it makes a picture much brighter
because it will it will affect that star
color it will start blowing out the star
cores and making them pure white
um so what i want to do at this point
with the picture is actually
separate the the stars and
the the nebulosity the milky way and the
and then the nebulae within the milky
way
um and there's a number of ways to do
that one way we could do that is
is right here in um photoshop
there is a dust and scratches filter
okay and you can see
that could do something that could
remove some of the stars and leave us
with just sort of this bland
outline of the milky way and then we
could enhance the colors that way
so that's one way to do it but it it you
lose a lot of sharpness doing it that
way
so instead what i want to do is i'm
going to use a machine
learning algorithm that
someone named nikita misura
i think i'm not sure exactly how you say
their name
but they have released this for free
it's called starnet
plus plus and so i'm gonna just show you
how to download that now
okay so from google i'm just going to
search for starnet plus plus like that
and the first uh search result here is
this sourceforge.net download site
and that's what you want to go to
and then go over here to files
and if you do have pix insight you can
get the pixel insight module
but assuming you don't have pix insight
we're going to just get the standalone
version and so you would just go into
version 1.1 here and then pick your
operating system
so if you're on windows pick windows or
win
if you're on mac pick this mac os and if
you're on linux pick the linux one
and i'll just click on that
and then it will start downloading here
okay it's finished downloading so i'm
just going to
open up those open up the zip
folder and put it on my desktop
and also on my desktop i'm going to save
this image in progress from photoshop
i'm going to save it as a tiff i don't
want
layers checked so i wanted to choose
tiff as a copy
and i'll just call it lagoon
for starnet i'll save it to the desktop
okay i'm going to hide photoshop
here's my lagoon for starnet file and
here's my
starnet underscore
mac os folder i'll open that up
and if you look at the readme this is
where it's going to give us
instructions on how to use it
okay and basically we just have to look
at
this little um
shell file here this is a just a little
command that's given um and if we open
that up i'm just going to open it with
a text editor but you can open it with
any kind of text editor it doesn't
matter
all we're going to do is just change
this right here to the name of our file
so i'm going to choose i'm going to say
lagoon for
starnet dot tiff and then i want the
output
to just be lagoon starless
and then the last thing here is i'm just
going to change the stride number to 32
what that means is that it will take a
little bit longer to process
than with a stride of 64 but it will
give us a better result
for removing the stars especially with
uh wide field images like this one
i'm gonna go ahead and save that script
close out of that okay with
that done we've edited the script uh
32-bit stride it has the right
file name we can go ahead and run the
script the way we do that is through
a command line program so i'm just going
to use the built-in
command line program on mac which is
terminal
and to run it we have to do two things
we first have to move to this directory
so i'm just going to type in
cd space to do change directory command
and then drag this folder over so
cd space and then go to the folder
hit enter we're now inside the folder
and from there i can run
this command just by dragging it over
and hit enter again
okay and then it starts its thing
um it uh
reads the file it tells me yep it's a
16-bit file
with three channels here's the height
and the width
here's the cpu
i'm using with tensorflow
um and then uh
this is the number of tiles that it's
going to break the file up into and then
it's going to look at each one
and remove stars from those tiles and
then recombine the image
and then down here it tells me how long
it's going to take for that
to happen a percentage as it's going
and you can see it just went from zero
to one percent
so it does take quite a while probably
at least an hour
maybe two on an image of this
size so we'll let it do its thing and
then we'll
pick back up when it's finished okay it
took about an hour and now it's
completed
so we can see here in the same folder
there is now a lagoon
starless file which looks like this
you can see there are some blue
star halos that look a little bit ugly
but
for the most part it did a good job of
removing the stars
from the image so now what we can do
is open back up photoshop
and open that image so i'm just going to
do
file open
and open the lagoon starless image
and i'm just going to play around with
this a little bit just
open up a curves adjustment and just add
a nice
s curve here to make it really dramatic
actually i'm going to take care of this
little
reddish corner a bit here let me just
open up a hue saturation
and i'm going to bring down the
saturation
then i'm going to fill this layer mask
on the hue saturation
with black so
we can just do edit fill
with
black okay so that
basically made this null but then i'll
just use a little
gradient here in the corner to bring
that back
so i've just set up a gradient here that
goes from black to a mid
gray and then i'll just
draw in
a little bit up there and continue to
turn down the saturation in that
corner just a little bit
okay so there's before and after
just tone down that redness in the
corner a bit
okay now i'm going to go ahead and take
my
star layer here first i have to
create its own layer so i'm just going
to do command
option shift e or control option shift e
on windows and that's just going to take
what's visible right now
and create an a new layer out of that
so command option shift e or control
option shift e on windows
makes a new layer from visible and it's
right over here layer one
i'm gonna select that layer with select
all
and copy it
and paste it onto this image the
starless image
okay and then with this layer what we
can do is
just apply a screen
blend mode so you can see right up here
right now it says normal
i'm just going to change that to screen
okay and you can see this uh
image is now a lot more detailed than
this image
because uh we're layering the stars
on top of the starless image
the only issue with it is that it's too
bright
so i'm going to now open up a curves
and reset my black point and apply
a tiny bit of an s curve here
like that and then the last thing i'm
going to do here is
uh the whole thing appears too saturated
now so then i'm going to reset the
saturation point just with the new
saturation slider
and i also just think it's just a little
bit too bright still so i'm going to
take down
the opacity
of that of the stars layer
just a little bit like that down to 90
percent
and i still feel like this corner is a
little bit
too red so i'm actually going to double
up this huge
saturation layer up there
so there's different ways we could deal
with the
these sort of purplish star halos one
way is we could go
could turn off this layer here for a
second and we could deal with them
directly
in this starless layer by clone stamping
them
out that's going to take a long time so
instead what i'm going to suggest we do
is just use the adobe camera raw
magenta and green halo reduction
thing i don't know exactly what they
call it but
you'll see it here in a second to deal
with that and then while we're in adobe
camera raw we can also apply
some noise reduction to this image
because it's only a
like a 10 minute uh total integration so
it is fairly noisy
and so we can we can bring down the
noise a little bit but i'm basically
happy with how the colors look
and uh and how much detail we've we've
gotten out of the lagoon and triffid
especially but
we also see a little bit in the omega
and eagle up here at the top
and and also some nice detail here in
the center this is called the
sagittarius star cloud
um okay so to bring it into adobe camera
raw
if you have adobe photoshop
creative cloud you can just go up here
to filter and there should be an option
somewhere in here for
adobe camera raw filter which is really
easy
but since i'm on an older version what i
do is i go to file
save as and i'm just going to save to
the desktop and call this
lagoon
final
and i don't need layers i'm going to
turn that off
i'll go ahead and embed the color
profile
save that tiff and then i'll open it
right back
up so i'm going to click on lagoon
final.tiff
but then where it says format right here
i'm going to change this
from tiff to camera raw
and click open then that will open up
the image
in camera raw i'm on version 9.1.1
um and there are two tabs that i want to
use in here
the first is this lens corrections tab
you can use
automatic lens profile corrections
it's just but it's not finding it since
we did all this work on it so let's just
uh
not use that let's go right onto color
and click on remove chromatic aberration
and then drag this purple slider
over a little bit
like that and i can just turn this off
and on
and you can see that it took out a lot
of the
purple out of the image and made it made
those
really aggressively big purple halos on
some of the stars
less noticeable and you can play around
this with this slider
so initially i'd put it at four and then
when i look at the change it made to the
image
maybe i think it took out a little too
much purple so
then i might bring it back down to like
three or two
and if you are noticing any green uh
noise in your picture you might also
play around with this removing
green chromatic aberration
too i don't think that's making any
difference on my image oh maybe a little
bit
i don't know i'll just leave it at one
okay the other thing we can do that i
mentioned is we can apply some noise
reduction and for this i recommend
zooming in a little bit
so here's our lagoon and triffid
and then i'm going to go to the detail
tab and i'm just going to apply
a little bit of color
and luminance noise reduction
so i usually start at around 20 for both
of these
and then just let the detail tabs just
sort of
go automatically you can also
play around with sharpness so one thing
that happens is when you apply
noise reduction your image can look a
little bit
blurred because that's basically what
it's doing is it's blurring at a
particular scale so then you can bring
back some of the image sharpness that
you've lost
through this sharpening right up here
and so it's basically a dance between
all these different sliders until it's
something
that you like and so what i'm always
doing
is i'm turning this little
preview check mark off and on
to see what it's doing to the image and
i also like to look at it
at different scales so so far i like
what it's doing
i wanted to zoom in on this part of the
image
yeah and in every view that i've looked
at so far
i like it better with the noise
reduction
on so that's good and i'm just going to
zoom out and look at the whole thing
again
and yeah i'm happy with how this image
is looking
so uh now it's just uh saving it or you
can you can open it back up into
photoshop if there's something else you
wanted to do like if you want to
continue working on crop or colors or
whatever you can just click open image
right there but i'm
happy with this this is basically my
final step so i'm going to click on
save image so from this save options
thing you can save it as a photoshop
document
dng jpeg or tiff for now i'm just going
to do
tiff and call this lagoon final 2
and then i'll also go back into that
same save image thing and save it as a
jpeg
for saving on for sharing on the web
called the same thing
okay and i'll say done
and then i'm just going to take a look
at my final image here
okay and now the moment of truth as i
mentioned a few times in this video i
was
shooting everything with two different
cameras using the same 50 millimeter
lens one camera was the stock 60d that's
what we just processed
and then i also shot it with the
modified 60d and did the processing as
closely as i could
to be the exact same so we could do this
comparison at the end
and here is the result so we have the
stock 60d on the left and the modified
60d
on the right and you can see that we do
have some
color differences uh both the color of
the milky way
um is a little bit different it's a
little bit more
yellow in the stock 60d example and a
little bit more
reddish magenta in the modified the
biggest color difference i think is this
star cloud in the stock 60d we have
these really
brilliant blue stars and in the modified
60d they got a little bit
purple and a little bit not as extreme
you can really see that's a cool
explosion of blue stars in the stock one
and the modified one
i don't think it makes quite as much of
an impact but what do we gain by going
modified well the first thing that i
notice
is that uh this we have some star
bloating maybe i would call it the stars
appear a bit bigger
on the stock 60d and they appear quite a
bit sharper on the modified 60d
especially if you look in this region
right here
and the reason for this is because the
stock 60d
still has what we call an optical
low-pass filter or an anti-aliasing
filter
installed in front of the sensor well
with the modified 60d we've removed
that so um we get we can get sharper
stars
the downside is that if you were
shooting something like a brick wall
or something you might get artifacts
with the modified 60d which you wouldn't
with the stock uh the other big
difference and you've probably already
noticed this
is that the ha emission nebulae like the
lagoon nebula down here
a little bit in the trifid the omega up
there
and this guy right here i call it the
twiddle bug nebula i think i
read that online are much redder and
more detailed
on the modified 60d compared to the
stock
you can see the lagoon gets a lot more
filled in
and it looks a little bit better i think
than
on the stock 60d where it gets a bit
more
blown out it's a bit more noisy on the
modified 60d
it looks uh this really nice
sort of bubblegum pink color
and then in the twiddle bug nebula
really
we're we are getting some faint ha
emission in the modified and really
nothing in the stock so that's a big
difference too between those two
other than that though i think uh
they're both you know just
10 minutes of data so there's still both
quite noisy
if uh we did longer uh
integrations we could get these looking
a lot better
so just keep that in mind this is just a
really a test and for education purposes
don't feel like these are finished
pictures necessarily
hopefully this comparison illustrated
some of the differences
if you're considering modifying
i will say that uh modifying does make
daylight photography a little bit more
challenging
you can get filters that will return it
to the original white balance in most
cases
so if you're considering modifying and
still want to use your camera for
daylight use you might consider that or
you can also
always shoot a custom white balance so
whenever you're out
shooting in the daytime you can bring a
white card and shoot a custom
white balance and get pretty natural
color that way too
but you can see even with trying to get
the colors
as as similar as possible
in my processing i couldn't quite do it
uh i was trying to get the milky way to
look
like this and the stars to look like my
stock 60d here in the modified version
and it just wouldn't uh let me get to
the same colors without really screwing
up the rest of the image so
i will say that uh if you do modify your
camera you're never going to get back to
probably completely natural color but
for most people the trade-off is well
worth it because
of the sharper stars and the
greatly increased ha emission
sensitivity
okay this has been nico carver from
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