tenrec The longer the better! The Orion Nebula is fairly large and bright compared to other objects in the night sky, but it’s still smaller than the moon, for example.
Great job Spencer, as per usual. I absolutely love astrophotography. I'm new at it but you can get really stunning shots pretty early on if you watch people like yourself and learn how.
That sounds rough! Summer is definitely a better time of year for astrophotography. Not that I follow that advice either. I took the thumbnail picture of the Orion Nebula about a week ago, and after just a few minutes of setting up the camera I could barely feel my fingers due to the cold... Anyway, hope next time works out better for you.
If I could bow to you, I would. THANK YOU, for answering a question I have been asking, but haven't gotten an answer to. I was going to get a telephoto lens that had 5.6 stop, but I have been told 4 or 3.5 is preferable. But I have often wondered if I could just stack more photos to make up for the loss of light with the F-stop being smaller. Thank you for covering that.
in your great tuto at 5:30min you mentioned export the photos to tif.. how ? i did 200 photos of M31 with 6s /6400iso and stacked them once with DSS and once with Sequator. unfortunately both results to much noise and bubble in photo even after trying to eliminate at processing with LR. pleaaaase advice : 1 the right order of preprocessing and processing 2 the best combination for my NIKON D5200. thank you
Very helpful , planing to night photography in the near future . Saved to favourites 👍. Nice and short and straight to the point . Love to see off camera flash photography tutorial
I’m really new to astrophotography . I have gotten some really good 30 second exposures with my Rebel T6 equipped with a 14mm Rokinon lens. I’m wanting to venture into getting a star tracker equipped telescope and a zwo camera for astrophotography specifically.
Thank you Spencer for sharing your amazing expertise. Recently I shot Milky Way. I could take 15-20 exposures of 10 sec long with 13 mm f1.8 lens on my Fuji XT4 camera using intervalometer. I want to use deep sky stacker. But it shows light files, dark files, flat files, offset /bias files in my picture when I uploaded I don’t see all these types except light files. Is there anything I need to do about this? Please make a video on deep sky stacker. Thank you 🙏🏽
One thing I'm confused about is how whether or not you can move your camera at all during this process. I'm assuming the answer is no, you cannot follow say, Andromeda, as it moves out of view. But then, how long can you shoot for? Until Andromeda itself leaves the frame? I ask that because what about all the other stars around it? Wouldn't the stars at the edge of the frame quickly leave the frame and introduce new stars on the opposite edge of the frame? Does that not matter for this process? Because I would think that would make image stacking impossible as newer stars wouldn't exist on as many frames as other parts of the image.
Good question! You can indeed follow your subject if you like. It’s the only good way to get 10+ minute cumulative exposures without a tracking head. Though it’s easier if you have a geared head rather than a ball head. If you don’t follow your subject (I didn’t for the photos here), you’re right that the stacking software will eventually mess up. The stars that leave, and the new ones that enter, probably won’t stack properly. So this method implies a bit of cropping. I cropped all my photos as a batch ahead of time to center the Orion Nebula each time (wasn’t quick) and then didn’t need to worry about my software misinterpreting stars near the edge. Hope this helps!
@@PhotographyLifeChannel Yes this definitely helps. I'll probably try both methods, but it sounds like it will definitely take a bit of practice for both to get working right. Previously the greater technical difficulty turned me away from astro, but now that I know I don't need an expensive star tracker and could use some free software, I think I'm willing to put in the work. Especially after seeing what you could achieve.
I have the Nikon D610 and the 16-35MM f4 and the 50mm 1.8g. I was thinking about trying to photography the nebula with the 50mm but I'm not sure about what aperture I should use. Yes if I put it to 1.8 it will get in more light but won't be as sharp as say f2.8 or 5.6!
If you use an aperture in the range from f/2.8 to f/5.6, you'll get sharper stars, but you'll need to take more photos in order to reduce noise to reasonable levels. A good rule of thumb is that you need to double the number of exposures you take, each time you stop down once more. So something like f/4 is probably a good balance, but it's up to you what balance works best. Hope this helps!
Hey your channel is amazing and i have a question can i photograph orion molecular cloud complex with an 18-55mm and I'm using a canon 600D how many lightframes and darkframes etc do i used to stack and what is the mm of my lens do i use to photograph orion molecular cloud complex? Hoping for your reply 😁
Glad you like the channel! The issue is that 55mm at the long end isn’t zoomed in enough to get a super clear photo of the nebula on its own. I used 300mm for this video and frankly 400mm+ is ideal. However, you can still take broader shots with more stars, and the Orion Nebula as a smaller object within the photo. You can do it following the exact steps in this video. Point the lens where you want, take a large number of 5 second exposures in sequence, and align them using one of the software options I listed in the description. You would only need one dark frame for this process, taken at the end of the series. Use 55mm, f/5.6, and a high ISO like 6400, 12800, or so. And try to do it on the clearest possible night. You can get great results, but it may take some trial and error!
Each individual shot will not have star trails, hence why I suggested 5 seconds per shot. At 10 seconds per shot, there will be very minor star trail effects in each photo. But the point of the process I’m covering here is to align the sharp images and average them together in order to avoid star trails. Other software out there can blend the same photos together to get star trails, if that’s what you’re after. But this is the technique to avoid them.
Hey super helpful video! Hard to find videos which go through this without talking about trackers in detail. When the stars are moving across each frame for deep sky for example, how does one need to align these frames or will the stacking software so this? Or is it a case of re adjusting for each frame? Thank in advance 😀
Hi Harry, apologies for my slow response! It depends on how much they move, but generally these programs have pretty good auto alignment built in. For the stack of the Orion Nebula in this video, though, the nebula reached both edges of my frame over the course of the sequence. That was a bit too much for any automatic aligning, so I had to do a rough manual crop of each shot before exporting the images to Lynkeos. Lynkeos then did the remaining alignment on its own without issue. Hope this helps!
Another great video. I have been looking at clips that use sequator (apply to any stacker) and have some questions. Say I use f2.4, ISO 3200 and a 15 second exposure, buy stacking can I drop the shutter speed and Iso? If so can you give me a ball park number of how far I can drop the iso and shutter speed and how many pictures I would need to take.
Sure thing, Mark. Lowering ISO is not the goal here. In fact raising ISO is more common, and arguably even preferable. That’s because the stacking process gets rid of the major problem of a high ISO - all the noise. As a result, you can indeed (and should) use a faster shutter speed to completely eliminate star trails. 15 seconds might be fine if you’re at 14mm, but the benefit of stacking is that 3 images at 10 seconds get you identical quality to 2 images at 15 seconds (with a higher ISO in the 10 second exposures, of course). The ballpark idea is simple: Drop the shutter speed to whatever value completely eliminates motion blur. No farther is necessary. Then, raise ISO to whatever gives you a good exposure without blowing out any stars. ISO 3200 is not a bad general choice. Last, take plenty of photos - enough so that your total exposure time is at least a few minutes. If your shutter speed is 10 seconds, I would take 30 or 36 photos if possible to give yourself 5 or 6 minutes of combined exposure. And more would be even better. Hope this helps!
Really Interesting and Good video. I am trying to get into astrophotography right now with a Nikon d300s and a 17 - 55 mm with a max aperture of 2.8. Do you think I can manage with this setup on a standard tripod?
It’s on the edge of what’s possible for single images, but it’s extremely easy to use that setup in combination with the image averaging technique. Once you have the right software, it should be no problem to use that kit for astrophotography.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel yeah, I did look more into image stacking and editing for astrophotography. I was just wondering if the bare equipment of mine fulfills the basic requirements.
Great video, thanks for putting it out! I haven't searched your channel to see if you have a video on the upcoming Jupiter Saturn alignment on Dec 21, but if you were going to shoot the upcoming Jupiter and Saturn alignment, would you use the short focal length lens 3.5 F or longer one with higher F, such as a 100-44mm with a F of 5-6.3? I don't mind taking lots of pictures or even manually keeping it in the field of view in order to get a better shot of the planets. I am in South Florida so the temperature won't be a factor. Although it is 2020 so I shouldn't say it won't be a factor! LOL Thanks, Bill
If you don’t mind taking multiple photos and averaging them as shown in this tutorial, longer focal lengths will be preferable by a wide margin. The narrow aperture means you’ll need to shoot at a higher ISO and take more photos to blend, but it’ll still give you much more detail overall than a wider lens. Manually keeping the planets in the frame will be a necessity! You’ll end up adjusting your composition every few minutes. Make 100% sure that your shutter speed gives no blur, even if it means shooting at 1/2 or 1 second and an absurdly high ISO. Image averaging can fix almost all problems aside from star/planet motion blur.
Two things ... 1) Amount of integrated time, upon stacking, gets way more when you want image more faint objects like the Whirlpool Galaxy, or even fainter. If you are in your light polluted backyard, forget even that. 2) To keep both, the background and foreground, the same you can create a composite of a stacked-background and the foreground;. Sequator does this well; wherein you can quickly select the foreground by a brush. You can, of course, motorize your simple German Equatorial Mount (GEM). However, therr is a cost to this; though not as much as the current trackers.
That’s true! Light pollution is a major factor, even if you do everything else right. And I agree about Sequator. Though I tend to use Starry Landscape Stacker for similar results.
Bro, I just have a canon digital camera, no telescope, what all things can I watch in the sky? Is it possible to get an image of saturn or Jupiter, where one can make out a the shape of the planet?
If you have a zoom lens that goes to at least 200mm (ideally 300mm or more), you may be able to just barely see the rings of Saturn, or the moons of Jupiter. It’s not the best tool for the job, though.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel Thanks🙏 Yesterday I captured Orion Constellation with iPhone camera, and stars were clearly visible, even the faint ones below Orion's belt (near/around Orion Nebula).
Yes, you need to re-adjust your composition every couple of minutes with the non-tracking head method. It’s definitely better to buy a dedicated star tracker if you plan to do a lot of this type of photography.
The software can align the photos really well so long as the stars don’t move way too far from one side to another. If you’re using a telephoto, maybe adjust your camera every couple minutes or so. With a wide angle, you don’t need to adjust at all. You won’t end up with star trails that way, everything will be sharp.
How can I incorporate my XT8 with my old D200? I know I need a T ring and that stuff but I can put the camera on a telescope eyepiece or do I use a high magnification lens? I have a Plossl eyepiece so the diameter of the view is really quite small, would that still work with my camera?
I’m afraid I don’t have experience with that, and an astrophotography forum would likely do a better job answering your question. But unless you have a sky tracker attachment with the XT8, it’s unfortunately not going to be as usable as you might like.
I wonder how long a lens you'd need to shoot photos of Andromeda, Orion, etc? I've never done it since I have no star tracker but I have taken a fair few photos of the moon with my 150-600 lens. Would that be too long though? I'm guessing stars will trail really quickly at those lenghts.
Star movement is definitely the problem. If you have a star tracker and a stable platform, Orion would be ideal even beyond 1000mm. But without a tracker, Orion will leave the frame very quickly at 1000mm, and your shutter speed has to be super quick! I shot the photo in this video at 420mm. Andromeda is larger and would work optimally around 500mm with a star tracker.
You can do the same thing with a mobile phone with a pro mode in the functions ,or a night mode and just take hundreds of photos I tried it , messed it up the first time and then boom
You can indeed! Thinking of making a video sometime later this year about the phone technique - getting good Milky Way shots with an iPhone 5 or something like that.
That’s a clever thought! Unfortunately, it wouldn’t lead to a noise improvement. The reason why this technique works is that the pattern of noise is totally different in every photo, while the pattern of the subject stays basically the same. Averaging will smooth out the pattern of noise while leaving the subject intact. If you duplicated a single photo several times and averaged it instead, the pattern of noise would be identical in each shot, and you’d just get back to where you started.
Is stacking how some photographers manage to get themselves included in the foreground? I can’t imagine they can standing absolutely still for 20 seconds.
Good question! I’ve done a couple of those before and never had to use image stacking to make them look good. With a wide angle lens, and minimal light on yourself (i.e. just being a silhouette) any little movements you make won’t be obvious in the final image. However, I also suspect that if you zoomed into the full resolution version of the photos you’re talking about, you’d see some very slight blurry edges on the person. Unless they are REALLY good at standing still :)
I've done it a few times and at least for me, I'll take a photo with the fastest shutter speed I can manage while having high ISO and then just use layers to include myself in the final photo. Doesn't work for every occasion, but since it's just a dark silhouette anyway, noise won't be much of a problem.
Photography Life: the best beginner targets are the Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula and The Pleiades Me, who is in the Southern Hemisphere and (at this time of year) is asleep when they are in the sky: Now what?
Living in the Southern Hemisphere, you have amazing views of the Milky Way! Maybe go for some wide angle shots instead of deep sky subjects. I bet you’ll get great results.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel I know. I have tried to get good Milky Way shots in the past but they don’t look very good. I think it might be because I live in a bortle 4 location
The A7s is great in low light! There's still a physical limit at those ISOs, though, because photons in low light are emitted from a source in a random pattern ("photon noise" - not something any camera can deal with). You'll find that the averaging technique in this video is still helpful for the A7s for this reason.
Very straightforward and easy to understand -- well done!
Glad you liked the video! Hope it gave you some good ideas for your astrophotography.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel It does. What focal length would you recommend for the Orion nebula? (I use a Nikon DX camera.)
tenrec The longer the better! The Orion Nebula is fairly large and bright compared to other objects in the night sky, but it’s still smaller than the moon, for example.
Great job Spencer, as per usual. I absolutely love astrophotography. I'm new at it but you can get really stunning shots pretty early on if you watch people like yourself and learn how.
Thank you! Yes, no excuse these days if there is something about photography you want to learn. So many good resources.
Ugh wish you posted this yesterday before i stood out side for 2hrs in the cold taking grainy star pictures.
That sounds rough! Summer is definitely a better time of year for astrophotography. Not that I follow that advice either. I took the thumbnail picture of the Orion Nebula about a week ago, and after just a few minutes of setting up the camera I could barely feel my fingers due to the cold... Anyway, hope next time works out better for you.
If I could bow to you, I would. THANK YOU, for answering a question I have been asking, but haven't gotten an answer to. I was going to get a telephoto lens that had 5.6 stop, but I have been told 4 or 3.5 is preferable. But I have often wondered if I could just stack more photos to make up for the loss of light with the F-stop being smaller. Thank you for covering that.
Hi Spencer - fantastic tutorial. You are a very gifted presenter / lecturer - amazing work! Best wishes from Cambridge, UK
Much appreciated!
You’re an excellent teacher.
Thank you Frank, glad you enjoyed it!
in your great tuto at 5:30min you mentioned export the photos to tif.. how ? i did 200 photos of M31 with 6s /6400iso and stacked them once with DSS and once with Sequator. unfortunately both results to much noise and bubble in photo even after trying to eliminate at processing with LR. pleaaaase advice :
1 the right order of preprocessing and processing
2 the best combination for my NIKON D5200. thank you
Very helpful , planing to night photography in the near future . Saved to favourites 👍.
Nice and short and straight to the point . Love to see off camera flash photography tutorial
I’m glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks for your guidance.🔥🔥
You got a new subscriber 👍👍
I’m really new to astrophotography . I have gotten some really good 30 second exposures with my Rebel T6 equipped with a 14mm Rokinon lens. I’m wanting to venture into getting a star tracker equipped telescope and a zwo camera for astrophotography specifically.
Thank you Spencer for sharing your amazing expertise. Recently I shot Milky Way. I could take 15-20 exposures of 10 sec long with 13 mm f1.8 lens on my Fuji XT4 camera using intervalometer. I want to use deep sky stacker. But it shows light files, dark files, flat files, offset /bias files in my picture when I uploaded I don’t see all these types except light files. Is there anything I need to do about this? Please make a video on deep sky stacker. Thank you 🙏🏽
One thing I'm confused about is how whether or not you can move your camera at all during this process. I'm assuming the answer is no, you cannot follow say, Andromeda, as it moves out of view. But then, how long can you shoot for? Until Andromeda itself leaves the frame? I ask that because what about all the other stars around it? Wouldn't the stars at the edge of the frame quickly leave the frame and introduce new stars on the opposite edge of the frame? Does that not matter for this process? Because I would think that would make image stacking impossible as newer stars wouldn't exist on as many frames as other parts of the image.
Good question! You can indeed follow your subject if you like. It’s the only good way to get 10+ minute cumulative exposures without a tracking head. Though it’s easier if you have a geared head rather than a ball head. If you don’t follow your subject (I didn’t for the photos here), you’re right that the stacking software will eventually mess up. The stars that leave, and the new ones that enter, probably won’t stack properly. So this method implies a bit of cropping. I cropped all my photos as a batch ahead of time to center the Orion Nebula each time (wasn’t quick) and then didn’t need to worry about my software misinterpreting stars near the edge. Hope this helps!
@@PhotographyLifeChannel Yes this definitely helps. I'll probably try both methods, but it sounds like it will definitely take a bit of practice for both to get working right. Previously the greater technical difficulty turned me away from astro, but now that I know I don't need an expensive star tracker and could use some free software, I think I'm willing to put in the work. Especially after seeing what you could achieve.
Hey. Great job. One question. What lens have you used for the orion nebula shot? At what mm? Thanks.
I am new in this field.I want to explore Astrophotography.Please suggest me basic equipments requires for deep sky,planets photography.
I have the Nikon D610 and the 16-35MM f4 and the 50mm 1.8g. I was thinking about trying to photography the nebula with the 50mm but I'm not sure about what aperture I should use. Yes if I put it to 1.8 it will get in more light but won't be as sharp as say f2.8 or 5.6!
If you use an aperture in the range from f/2.8 to f/5.6, you'll get sharper stars, but you'll need to take more photos in order to reduce noise to reasonable levels. A good rule of thumb is that you need to double the number of exposures you take, each time you stop down once more. So something like f/4 is probably a good balance, but it's up to you what balance works best. Hope this helps!
If I send my Milky Way Raw file would you mind giving some suggestions on editing ? Please reply. Thanks
Hey your channel is amazing and i have a question can i photograph orion molecular cloud complex with an 18-55mm and I'm using a canon 600D how many lightframes and darkframes etc do i used to stack and what is the mm of my lens do i use to photograph orion molecular cloud complex? Hoping for your reply 😁
Glad you like the channel! The issue is that 55mm at the long end isn’t zoomed in enough to get a super clear photo of the nebula on its own. I used 300mm for this video and frankly 400mm+ is ideal. However, you can still take broader shots with more stars, and the Orion Nebula as a smaller object within the photo. You can do it following the exact steps in this video. Point the lens where you want, take a large number of 5 second exposures in sequence, and align them using one of the software options I listed in the description. You would only need one dark frame for this process, taken at the end of the series. Use 55mm, f/5.6, and a high ISO like 6400, 12800, or so. And try to do it on the clearest possible night. You can get great results, but it may take some trial and error!
@@PhotographyLifeChannel does it make star trails? For example i take a 20 images with a 6 or 10 seconds exposure?
Each individual shot will not have star trails, hence why I suggested 5 seconds per shot. At 10 seconds per shot, there will be very minor star trail effects in each photo. But the point of the process I’m covering here is to align the sharp images and average them together in order to avoid star trails. Other software out there can blend the same photos together to get star trails, if that’s what you’re after. But this is the technique to avoid them.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel ohh okay thanks
Hey super helpful video! Hard to find videos which go through this without talking about trackers in detail.
When the stars are moving across each frame for deep sky for example, how does one need to align these frames or will the stacking software so this? Or is it a case of re adjusting for each frame? Thank in advance 😀
Hi Harry, apologies for my slow response! It depends on how much they move, but generally these programs have pretty good auto alignment built in. For the stack of the Orion Nebula in this video, though, the nebula reached both edges of my frame over the course of the sequence. That was a bit too much for any automatic aligning, so I had to do a rough manual crop of each shot before exporting the images to Lynkeos. Lynkeos then did the remaining alignment on its own without issue. Hope this helps!
@@PhotographyLifeChannel awesome thanks Spencer, great advice, appreciate it! looking forward to catching myself some nebulae! 😎
@@harry_wardd Good luck, should be exciting!
Another great video. I have been looking at clips that use sequator (apply to any stacker) and have some questions. Say I use f2.4, ISO 3200 and a 15 second exposure, buy stacking can I drop the shutter speed and Iso? If so can you give me a ball park number of how far I can drop the iso and shutter speed and how many pictures I would need to take.
Sure thing, Mark. Lowering ISO is not the goal here. In fact raising ISO is more common, and arguably even preferable. That’s because the stacking process gets rid of the major problem of a high ISO - all the noise. As a result, you can indeed (and should) use a faster shutter speed to completely eliminate star trails. 15 seconds might be fine if you’re at 14mm, but the benefit of stacking is that 3 images at 10 seconds get you identical quality to 2 images at 15 seconds (with a higher ISO in the 10 second exposures, of course). The ballpark idea is simple: Drop the shutter speed to whatever value completely eliminates motion blur. No farther is necessary. Then, raise ISO to whatever gives you a good exposure without blowing out any stars. ISO 3200 is not a bad general choice. Last, take plenty of photos - enough so that your total exposure time is at least a few minutes. If your shutter speed is 10 seconds, I would take 30 or 36 photos if possible to give yourself 5 or 6 minutes of combined exposure. And more would be even better. Hope this helps!
@@PhotographyLifeChannel Thank you. Have been on a trip. Wanted to give it a go, but no clear nights
Really Interesting and Good video. I am trying to get into astrophotography right now with a Nikon d300s and a 17 - 55 mm with a max aperture of 2.8. Do you think I can manage with this setup on a standard tripod?
It’s on the edge of what’s possible for single images, but it’s extremely easy to use that setup in combination with the image averaging technique. Once you have the right software, it should be no problem to use that kit for astrophotography.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel yeah, I did look more into image stacking and editing for astrophotography. I was just wondering if the bare equipment of mine fulfills the basic requirements.
Great video, thanks for putting it out! I haven't searched your channel to see if you have a video on the upcoming Jupiter Saturn alignment on Dec 21, but if you were going to shoot the upcoming Jupiter and Saturn alignment, would you use the short focal length lens 3.5 F or longer one with higher F, such as a 100-44mm with a F of 5-6.3? I don't mind taking lots of pictures or even manually keeping it in the field of view in order to get a better shot of the planets. I am in South Florida so the temperature won't be a factor. Although it is 2020 so I shouldn't say it won't be a factor! LOL Thanks, Bill
If you don’t mind taking multiple photos and averaging them as shown in this tutorial, longer focal lengths will be preferable by a wide margin. The narrow aperture means you’ll need to shoot at a higher ISO and take more photos to blend, but it’ll still give you much more detail overall than a wider lens. Manually keeping the planets in the frame will be a necessity! You’ll end up adjusting your composition every few minutes. Make 100% sure that your shutter speed gives no blur, even if it means shooting at 1/2 or 1 second and an absurdly high ISO. Image averaging can fix almost all problems aside from star/planet motion blur.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel Great thank you for this info!
Two things ...
1) Amount of integrated time, upon stacking, gets way more when you want image more faint objects like the Whirlpool Galaxy, or even fainter. If you are in your light polluted backyard, forget even that.
2) To keep both, the background and foreground, the same you can create a composite of a stacked-background and the foreground;. Sequator does this well; wherein you can quickly select the foreground by a brush.
You can, of course, motorize your simple German Equatorial Mount (GEM). However, therr is a cost to this; though not as much as the current trackers.
That’s true! Light pollution is a major factor, even if you do everything else right. And I agree about Sequator. Though I tend to use Starry Landscape Stacker for similar results.
Great video! Greetings from Greece, Subsribed.
Thank you, Vasilis, and welcome to my channel! Sorry for the delay in my response, I've been offline for a few days. Greetings from Colorado!
awesome video!
Thank you, Stephan!
Bro, I just have a canon digital camera, no telescope, what all things can I watch in the sky?
Is it possible to get an image of saturn or Jupiter, where one can make out a the shape of the planet?
If you have a zoom lens that goes to at least 200mm (ideally 300mm or more), you may be able to just barely see the rings of Saturn, or the moons of Jupiter. It’s not the best tool for the job, though.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel Thanks🙏
Yesterday I captured Orion Constellation with iPhone camera, and stars were clearly visible, even the faint ones below Orion's belt (near/around Orion Nebula).
@@theanist3908 That's awesome! The night mode on recent phones is really impressive.
Wait but won’t the target move out the way? With like a 300mm lens the object will just go won’t it?
Yes, you need to re-adjust your composition every couple of minutes with the non-tracking head method. It’s definitely better to buy a dedicated star tracker if you plan to do a lot of this type of photography.
stacking without tracker? doesnt it make star trails? or i need to move my camera after every photo?
The software can align the photos really well so long as the stars don’t move way too far from one side to another. If you’re using a telephoto, maybe adjust your camera every couple minutes or so. With a wide angle, you don’t need to adjust at all. You won’t end up with star trails that way, everything will be sharp.
Great info
Thanks 😄
damn i love listening to you. super nice explanation, good voice, good job my dude
How can I incorporate my XT8 with my old D200? I know I need a T ring and that stuff but I can put the camera on a telescope eyepiece or do I use a high magnification lens? I have a Plossl eyepiece so the diameter of the view is really quite small, would that still work with my camera?
I’m afraid I don’t have experience with that, and an astrophotography forum would likely do a better job answering your question. But unless you have a sky tracker attachment with the XT8, it’s unfortunately not going to be as usable as you might like.
I wonder how long a lens you'd need to shoot photos of Andromeda, Orion, etc? I've never done it since I have no star tracker but I have taken a fair few photos of the moon with my 150-600 lens. Would that be too long though? I'm guessing stars will trail really quickly at those lenghts.
Star movement is definitely the problem. If you have a star tracker and a stable platform, Orion would be ideal even beyond 1000mm. But without a tracker, Orion will leave the frame very quickly at 1000mm, and your shutter speed has to be super quick! I shot the photo in this video at 420mm. Andromeda is larger and would work optimally around 500mm with a star tracker.
You can do the same thing with a mobile phone with a pro mode in the functions ,or a night mode and just take hundreds of photos I tried it , messed it up the first time and then boom
You can indeed! Thinking of making a video sometime later this year about the phone technique - getting good Milky Way shots with an iPhone 5 or something like that.
Fantastic! Génial! Thanks Spencer!
Francois, thank you very much!
I’m wondering what lens you were using for your Orion Nebula.
I was using the older Nikon 300mm f/4 adapted to the Nikon Z7.
What would happen if we stacked the same photo again and again... Just one photo?
That’s a clever thought! Unfortunately, it wouldn’t lead to a noise improvement. The reason why this technique works is that the pattern of noise is totally different in every photo, while the pattern of the subject stays basically the same. Averaging will smooth out the pattern of noise while leaving the subject intact. If you duplicated a single photo several times and averaged it instead, the pattern of noise would be identical in each shot, and you’d just get back to where you started.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel hmm okay! Thanks 👌🏻 I can see now why it wouldn't work 😂😂😅
Im also doing Astrophotography without star tracker👍
Is stacking how some photographers manage to get themselves included in the foreground? I can’t imagine they can standing absolutely still for 20 seconds.
Good question! I’ve done a couple of those before and never had to use image stacking to make them look good. With a wide angle lens, and minimal light on yourself (i.e. just being a silhouette) any little movements you make won’t be obvious in the final image. However, I also suspect that if you zoomed into the full resolution version of the photos you’re talking about, you’d see some very slight blurry edges on the person. Unless they are REALLY good at standing still :)
I've done it a few times and at least for me, I'll take a photo with the fastest shutter speed I can manage while having high ISO and then just use layers to include myself in the final photo. Doesn't work for every occasion, but since it's just a dark silhouette anyway, noise won't be much of a problem.
Photography Life: the best beginner targets are the Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula and The Pleiades
Me, who is in the Southern Hemisphere and (at this time of year) is asleep when they are in the sky: Now what?
Living in the Southern Hemisphere, you have amazing views of the Milky Way! Maybe go for some wide angle shots instead of deep sky subjects. I bet you’ll get great results.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel I know. I have tried to get good Milky Way shots in the past but they don’t look very good. I think it might be because I live in a bortle 4 location
Use the Sony a7s I cranked that mf to 80,000 iso and I still got a clean and clear image. Little to no noise
The A7s is great in low light! There's still a physical limit at those ISOs, though, because photons in low light are emitted from a source in a random pattern ("photon noise" - not something any camera can deal with). You'll find that the averaging technique in this video is still helpful for the A7s for this reason.
@@PhotographyLifeChannel I like how RUclips didn’t notify me, it was still a super helpful video!!
TQ
UW
Noice
Thanks!