Astrophotography from $100 to $10,000
I have five different setups
for astrophotography here and tonight, they are all going to be centered on
one patch of sky at the core of our milky way galaxy in an epic one-night shootout the contenders
are using your smartphone with a DIY hand-turned tracker a basic DSLR and kit lens on a tripod a
basic DSLR and fast telephoto lens on a motorized star tracker a modified DSLR and a small
refractor telescope on a budget go-to mount and lastly a dedicated mono camera with LRGB
filters in a motorized filter wheel and a premium refractor with an automated
focuser all on a heavy go-to mount. Welcome! My name is Nico Carver and
I’m interested in helping people explore this wonderful hobby we call
astrophotography which simply means photographing the night sky tonight I’ll show
you some different approaches to astrophotography in terms of gear that you may choose to
use to shoot the night sky and I’ll walk through how each system works and how you set each one up
to get the best results possible and of course, we’re going to compare the final images that I’ve
produced with each kit all in one night this is a shootout in the sense that the other night I shot
the same patch of sky with each kit but it’s by no means a scientific test as the systems are just
too different to try to like closely match settings um so it’s not apples to apples
here it’s more apples to oranges to passionfruit but that’s the point for fans of short videos
this is probably not going to be one of those but check out my channel and subscribe um because I’ve
been putting out a lot of shorter videos recently including a series you may have seen of five
minute and under videos every Friday that I’m calling five-minute Fridays first off I want to
give a huge thank you to high point scientific which is a great online store for all
things astronomy and astrophotography they have telescopes mounts cameras accessories
everything that you’d need to get started and this is not sponsored by them meaning that no
money is exchanged hands but in my request high point, scientific did lend me the skywatcher eqm35
mount and the aperture 72-millimeter refractor which came with a matching field flattener and
this is a huge help because going forward with this channel I can’t afford to buy everything
that I want to review and show you in these videos um but that said everything else in this video is
things that I’ve personally bought over the years you know I have way too much stuff but i
can always do more giveaways I wanted to say that a number of these cameras and the skywatcher star
adventure and things like that are things that I bought specifically for this channel with proceeds
from my Patreon campaign which keeps this channel going so other huge thanks to everyone
who supports me over on Patreon it’s a patreon.com nebula photo and if you’re interested it starts
at just one dollar per month and there are tons of benefits in joining my community over on Patreon
including participation in imaging challenges exclusive giveaways exclusive channels on my
discord server zoom chats all kinds of stuff the first kit uh we’re looking at here may look a
a little bit strange if you’re new to amateur or photography or new to my channel this is a device
that I built to manually track the night sky, uh it costs about 30 in parts to make the
tracker and if you’re interested in building it I have a video for that of course I’ll link it
in the right corner here and also in the video description the rest of the hundred dollars
this kit is used for buying a sturdy tripod that I got you could get used and a clamp
for your smartphone, I’m not including the cost of the smartphone itself um because I’m guessing
most people have access to a phone or some kind of camera another thing I want to point out
with this kit, I call it the DIYer because my thinking with this one is just you know trying
to get the most out of things you have around the house or can build for pretty cheap which is why
I don’t include the cost of the smartphone itself um because the point is just to use any
the camera you can get your hands on whether it’s in a smartphone or a point-and-shoot or whatever
it is and put it on top of this barn door tracker and with any of these cameras including the
the smartphone’s worth seeing if the camera shoots in raw format and uses that rather than jpeg
if that’s an option if it only shoots jpeg that’s okay too for this just make sure you pick the
highest quality jpeg option let’s now go through the steps of setting up the DIY-er thank you to
maggie so much for assisting with the b-roll here so we start by putting the tripod on solid ground
and pointing it roughly north or south if you’re in the southern hemisphere and then we put the
barn door tracker on making sure it’s securely attached and then the same thing we put our phone
or whatever camera you’re using on top of the barn door tracker then comes polar alignment in the
northern hemisphere a cheap way to do this is just with a basic siding device like a little uh
the straw I’m using a metal drinking straw here and we just need to line up the pole star which
is Polaris in you know which is pretty close to the north celestial pole okay then after we’re
polar aligned we’re just going to take the phone and point it at the center of the milky way work out
some of the settings here in the camera app uh the app that comes on my Huawei phone is very good
for giving me pretty much full control over the settings in pro mode but if your native camera app
isn’t very good just check out your app store or the google play store as there are several
um alternative apps these days I’ve heard about night cap camera for ios and deep sky camera for
android are two uh really good apps I’ve heard okay let’s talk about the pros and cons of this
kit the pros are it’s inexpensive uh especially if you’re using a camera you already have around like
a smartphone it’s very quick to set up it’s pretty lightweight the cons are you’re limited to very
wide field uh both due to how the tracker works but also just if you’re using a smartphone it
probably only has wide-angle lenses another con and sort of a big one for me is
that it can get sort of tiring and boring because you’re manually moving the clock wheel uh for the
entire time and this could be overcome by adding a small motor to the tracker which is something
I’m interested in trying okay the last con is that it requires a lot of tinkering to get
good results both the manual barn door tracker and the phone required a lot of trial and error with
both technique and with settings before I could get anything that I liked and this isn’t
necessarily a con it’s just something to keep in mind if you don’t like tinkering then this kit
‘s probably not the one for you okay let’s look at the image I produce now I’m pretty happy with
the colors look reasonably good the star color we got some nice detail on the large dark nebulae
in a milky way and it shows off some of the other kits in the bottom right corner here in the
a foreground that we’re going to be talking about this next kit I love just because of how simple it
is hence the nickname I picked for it keeping it simple what you need for this kit is just any
DSLR or mirrorless camera with the wide-angle zoom kit lens that came with it and we’re going to
use the kit lens all the way zoomed out so in my case that’s an 18-millimeter focal length I’m using a
canon t7 here which is their most affordable DSLR the only other two pieces of gear I used are a
tripod and again I prefer a used tripod if you can get one from like a good brand and then lastly
we have this super cheap little shutter release cable here this thing is pretty great because it
doesn’t even take batteries it’s just a simple circuit with some wires and a little switch this
button which um if you know press it down it takes a picture if you press halfway
it focuses if you have it on autofocus and then you can also lock it like that and so
I’ve used this before as a manual bulb timer like just like a lock it waits for five minutes and then
unlock it but a commenter on an older video of mine pointed out that you can just put a DSLR on
continuous shooting mode and then lock the switch and the camera will continuously keep taking
photos until you either unlock the switch or the battery runs out or your memory card
fills and I love this because it’s simple it does exactly what I want and nothing more and
I don’t have to worry about what interval versus delay means or that kind of thing and it’s
also cheaper than an intervalometer I don’t have to worry about batteries since it doesn’t take
and so the only time I still use an intervalometer is if I’m taking pictures longer than 30 seconds
each and that usually only comes up once you add tracking which we’ll get to next uh setup
keeping, it simple is a breeze you just plop down the tripod and add the camera point
it is at a bright star or planet manually focus by making that bright star as small as possible
in the live view with 10 times zoom turned on and once you’re focused you pointed at what
you are shooting in this case the milky way core you lock the shutter release and let it
take hundreds of photos and for super wide angle stuff like this at 18 millimeters we don’t
have to re-center that often I always just recenter when I check focus which depending
on how much the temperature is changing I usually do every 20 30 40 minutes something like that so
I think I re-centered once during the night and I took like 600 pictures um the settings were iso
3200 10 seconds exposure lens wide open at f 3.5 the reason I went to 10 seconds even though that
was a little bit past what the pdf rule suggested f 3.5 is a little bit slower than I’m usually
so I wanted to get as much light in as I could uh to bring down the noise here is what I see
as for the pros and cons of this setup the pros are it’s very simple and it’s a pretty low effort the
setup time is just very fast you just need to focus point it milky way start snapping away it’s
relatively low cost if you’re a photographer you might already have a camera lens you can use
and a tripod and the shutter release cable and it’s pretty easy to upgrade you just need
to upgrade the lens to get much better results now speaking of the results I’d say that’s the
The only con is that the results aren’t like super great they’re not that much better than the DIY-er
where we had the barn door tracker but the reason is I think because the kit lens is just a little
bit soft so you could consider a lens upgrade to get better performance um you know if you want
to throw money at it or if you’re a tinkerer you could combine this kit with the di wire so if
If you have a DSLR you can put that on the barn door tracker for thirty dollars you have tracking
and that’s gonna give you better results too anyways let’s get to the final image this is
In the final stacked image that I made with the kit lens, you can see really
bloats the blue stars some people I think to find this pretty I think that it is okay
it makes them a little bit overpowering though but all in all you know it’s a nice picture of
the milky way core and I think shows a little bit more detail than the smartphone shot okay
the name of this one is of course a little bit you know tongue-in-cheek it’s but it’s true
that many people who go as far as getting a small star tracker like the skywatcher star adventure
I found to get hooked on astrophotography because they realize how fun it is and so then
they spend a lot more eventually to get the full go-to mountain telescope which is what we’ll
cover next but the gateway drug is a very capable kit that opens you up to many new possibilities
since the star adventure can track the night sky with not just a wide angle lens but a telephoto
lens and in this case I’m using a prime telephoto called the rocky 135 f2 which is a great
value for astrophotography I got mine for 450 when it was on sale they go on sale frequently
and the reason it’s a great value is that it’s pretty sharp wide open at f2 it’s pretty amazing
the bot and off mask and the USB dew heater strip are optional but they don’t add too
much to the cost especially if like me you can 3d print your body knob mask from a friend or a
library the bose nav mask if you’re unfamiliar is a focusing aid that works well with telephoto lenses
and with telescopes and you just point it at a bright star and you line up the central line
with this x pattern that the star forms when you put the mask on you have to remember to take
the mask back off but then you have perfect focus the dew heater is to keep the lens from fogging
up really we could use this on any of the kits but I’m just with this kit since we’re like a
a little bit more advanced I think you probably should get the dew heater especially if you are in
a place with high humidity or if you’re going to be pointing the lens more up if the lens is pretty
perpendicular then the lens hood usually can prevent most dew from falling on the glass
but in the summer I do recommend a dew heater this setup is a little bit more involved we
need to get everything securely attached the star adventurer goes directly on the tripod legs
and then we put this thing called the declination bracket in the clamp on the star adventure finally
the camera and the lens go on top of that then we need to make sure that it’s balanced between the
camera and the counterweight this is so we don’t put too much stress on the gears which are turning
everything after that’s done we look through a tiny little telescope built into the tracker
called a polar alignment scope and this is how we line it up with the north celestial pole or
the self celestial pole with polar alignment done we then turn to focus the main lens and this
time like I said if you have a bose nav mask you can use one if not just make the stars as small as
possible we then point the telescope at our target unlike the previous two kits we now need to do a
bit more of a precision pointing um because to get it framed up how we want because we’re not just
pointing at the milky way we want to point at the really interesting part which for me is the
lagoon and trifid right in the center there and so uh this can be frustrating to know how
to point and how to find things in the night sky it’s a learning process it takes many nights but
I do have a video on some tips to use technology to help you out a little bit but don’t expect
to be great at it right away okay with all that done we’ve taken a test shot we know we’re pointed
correctly we’re in focus we then turn on tracking on the star adventure program the intervalometer
to take let’s say 100 shots and after about 100 shots at 30 seconds each that’s time that I’d
like to check focus if focus looks good then I’ll take another 100 if not then I’ll refocus and then
reprogram the intervalometer take another 100 then at the end of the night we’re going to take our
calibration frames which are our dark bias and flats with the flats you do need some kind of
white light source so as an iPad works well as a tracing tablet anything that’s sort of flat
and white you just put that right on top of the lens to take the flats I go into a lot more detail
about how to take these things in sort of my start-to-finish videos so I’m not going to go into
all of that now since this is just more about comparison and how you set these different things
the pros of this kit are it’s still pretty lightweight and portable you can take
it is on an airplane as I have many times before and it’s pretty versatile we could we could use it for
tracked milky way shooting with a wide angle lens or like we’re doing here focus in on some large
nebulae like lagoon and driftwood with a telephoto lens or a small telescope it works with stuff you
may already have like it works with the tripod it works with a camera and lens so instead of
spending you know the full 1500 you may just be spending 425 to get the star tracker and
I like that the star tracker runs it for a long time on double a battery very
convenient the cons are that the setup time is starting to get longer especially if you’re
new to astrophotography both polar alignment and finding objects at higher focal length can can
take a bit of time the last con is that I’ve heard for many that the star tracker is not available in
their country so it can be frustrating to see all these videos about how great it is and then and
not be able to buy one okay let’s look at what I produced with this setup this was 300 lights
at 30 seconds each so about two and a half hours total I shot it iso 3200 with the pokemon
wide open at f2 as I said earlier I did get the calibration frames with this one so 50 each of
darks bias and flats and you can see we got some great detail on the lagoon and trifid nebulae here
as well as the star field the rocking lens I think is very impressive on the stars, especially on a
crop sensor camera like I was using a canon t7 this mounted telescope for this kit that
getting serious was lent to me by the fine folks at high point scientific and so um this was
only my second night shooting with this mountain telescope I did a brief test a couple of nights
before to make sure it was all working okay which it was and then this was my
first real experience shooting with it and I was very impressed by both the mount and
the telescope the mount again is a sky watcher sqm 35 mount and it does have some faults I the
accuracy of the go-to system with just the hand controller what we’d call the pointing accuracy it
wasn’t that impressive but the tracking which is more important to me was great for 30
second exposures at a focal length of 430 millimeters with this aperture refractor I was
getting perfect stars every single shot I didn’t have any trailing issues the stars
looked great across the field for the camera I got a barely used canon t7 off eBay for 350 and
then I had it modified for 300 from astrogear.net and I’ll be doing more of a review of different
kinds of DSLR modifications in future videos now for the accessories I decided to keep
simply, we could have gone a lot with more stuff here but I just went with like a
dew heater controller and a dew heater strap for the telescope I’m controlling the DSLR with an
intervalometer and I used a bose nav mask for focusing now you of course can add a lot more
to this kit uh auto guiding computer control automated focusing all this kind of stuff but i
was interested in just keeping it to the basics um to keep it just sort of to the minimal kit for
a telescope and for me, this is the base kit that I’d suggest if you want to get into
astrophotography with a telescope I wouldn’t try to spend much less than this now to power it
all I was feeding both this kit and the next kit I’ll show you off one big deep cycle lead acid
battery which is a pretty affordable battery given a huge capacity but the downside of that kind
of battery is that it’s super heavy uh the truth is though um I would never really consider this
a portable kit you need a car to bring all this stuff to a dark site so you couldn’t
hike with this just the tripod is huge so the heaviness of the battery doesn’t matter too
much uh to me as long as I can safely lift it out of the car setup of this one is a bit more complex
then the last one it just uh it takes a little bit more time we just need to get everything securely
attached to the mount we balance it we pull our alignment with the built-in polar scope we turn
everything is on and then there’s a bit of setup there’s the hand controller set up we have to
feed it some information like our location and our GPS location you can get all this information from
a smartphone app like polar finder pro you just type it in here then we go through a three-star
alignment process and this is to train the go-to system and it’s going to point the telescope
at different bright stars and then you have to center them on your DSLR screen by pressing left
right up and down arrows on the hand controller now even after I did this the go-to’s were still
about a degree off and so I really should have brought like a tetrad some kind of finder scope
because this could get frustrating fast if you’re doing go-to’s and they’re off the
the caveat I’ll mention is that this again was just my second night using it so I could maybe
there’s some way to fine-tune the pointing one way of course is you can connect it to
a computer and then you can plate solve to correct the pointing and that’s really
fast and good the pros of this setup are we can accurately track at 430 millimeters
which gives us a much more detailed view of deep sky objects another pro is that the
the mount can handle the weight of a telescope and telescopes can be optimized for
astrophotography more so than camera lenses also has more potential for upgrades we can
as I mentioned we could add complete automation if we wanted the cons are there is much more to
learn here before you can get good results and the kit is way too heavy and bulky at this point to
hike or fly with it uh it’s just like you could put it in your car and bring it somewhere
all right and here is the final image I was super impressed by this not a huge amount of effort to
get nice results this is only 159 lights at 30 seconds each so under 90 minutes total at
an f ratio of f6 iso 3200 the star rendering is amazing the field flattener is doing
its job as the stars look around in the corners it’s amazing to me that the whole telescope and
field flattener is only 700 if you get them as a set because these stars look near perfect I didn’t
see any excessive star bloat or color fringing so I think this is going to be hard to
beat but let’s see if the next kid can do it this is my kit that I’ve been slowly
adding to and upgrading parts over the years at this point almost everything in it has been
upgraded at least once and that’s how I can afford something like this I’ve never had this much
money all at once but I just save up for one new upgrade or thing at a time if I want a new
the telescope I can then offset the cost a bit by selling my old one so to step through this the eq
6r mount you may have heard of because it’s just a tremendous value at around sixteen hundred dollars
for a mount that will reliably hold like 30 plus pounds and has you know reasonably
good and reliable pointing and tracking the camera I’m using I also love it’s relatively
new to me but so far so good the why 268m it’s a mono camera meaning I need filters in
front of it and I use two-inch filters from Leah and a qhy seven position filter wheel i
have large and the three main narrow band filters being sulfur oxygen and hydrogen alpha for guiding
I use an off-axis guider with the two quasi 290 mini the telescope is a stellar view SVQ 86 that
they only made a very limited run in 2018 so I’m very happy to have gotten one because i
love it it has an aperture of 86 millimeters focal length of 464.
So that makes it a focal ratio of
5.4 and then I have a bunch of accessories the main ones are I have an op tech autofocus system a
pegasus pocket power box for power and dew heater stuff and then a qhy pole master for its computer
assisted polar alignment the setup of this one is not too bad because I’ve refined
it over the years and keep most things connected to the top of the telescope so I can just
plop the whole thing on connecting a few wires balance it and then basically the rest of the
setup is on the laptop I have a whole video on how I do this kind of setup you might need
updating because I made it a few years ago now but most of it I think is still how I do it
it’s still good information I still use all the same programs I use then like eq mod cartouch
phd2 pull master and sequence generator pro I’m not going to go deep into the software stuff
but I’ll just say that there are so many options for software that control your gear that it can be
a little bit overwhelming if you’re a beginner but i just suggest trying things out and seeing if you
like them don’t feel pressured to use something just because someone else does or something
like that use whatever makes sense to you for me once I’ve learned a process that is giving me good
data I don’t feel the need to change unless I have to for some reason once I hit start start
sequence on sequence generator pro everything is automated it does an automated focus routine
every half hour it guides and dithers on its own it changes the filters on its own if the object
if the object I’m shooting crosses the meridian it will flip the telescope to the other side of
the mount so it can continue tracking and this is really what you are paying for with something like
this it’s just a piece of mind that you can leave it alone you don’t have to babysit it and it will
Being reliable gives you reliably good data and for me, this is worth a lot because I can then work on big
multi-year projects that I enjoy with my main kit while I’m testing things and making youtube videos
helping friends and just enjoying the night sky so for me, the main pros of this setup are one
automation two reliable data quality and three great narrow band data even from the city this
isn’t something I’m going to talk about in this video but I have three-nanometer antelia
narrowband filters for this kit and that lets me an image from Somerville where I live which is portal
8 right next to downtown Boston now the cons are this kit is very heavy and bulky it’s expensive
and it’s complex and the main problem with complexity is if something goes wrong there
are so many possibilities for what it could be because there are dozens and dozens
of possible points of failure with a kit like this one but I’ve learned two things about complex
Astro setups over the years first one always bring extra cables for everything in your kit you
know you want an extra cable and if something isn’t connecting or something’s acting a weird try
switching out the cable because I can’t tell you how many times that’s worked for some reason even
if I don’t think the cable is bad changing the cable then it works the second thing is once
everything’s updated on your laptop or your raspberry pi or whatever you’re using don’t update
the software and I know sometimes you maybe you want to update the software because there’s a
new feature or something if you have to update do it on a new moon and see if anything breaks if
and then you know have a plan for rolling back to your stable setup if something goes wrong okay
looking at the final image this is 20 luminance frames and 10 each of red green and blue all at
two minutes each so a total of one hour 40 minutes I think the main things that make it stand apart
a bit from the last image with the last kit is that it’s already pretty low noise and that’s
mostly thanks to this amazing camera the qhy 268m the star color and the contrast in general are
a little bit more pleasing to me I mean I’m sure I could match the two images better in terms of
color in processing but I just did very minimal processing to show you more of the baseline
differences between these different kits and again I don’t think that in terms of just normal color
image performance that the life for the kit is worth four times more than the getting
serious kit it’s really when you add in narrow band capabilities and all the
automation that you start to get why it’s so much more expensive for that sort of
peace of mind now that we have a feel for each kit let’s do some comparisons and let’s start with
the weight of each kit the total weight of the di wire is 7 pounds or 3.2 kilograms I can easily
lift the whole thing with one arm moves it around I’d say that it would be pretty easy just to strap
it to a backpack and hike with it if you want the keeping it simple is even lighter at 5.5
pounds or 2.5 kilograms easy to hike with the total weight of the gateway drug
is about 13 pounds or 5.9 kilograms still can hike with it but it’s more than double
the weight of either of the first two kits and the total weight of the getting serious kit is 31.2
pounds or 14.2 kilograms and this is without the lead acid battery I use to power it which alone
weighs 59 pounds or 26.8 kilograms this is the kind of setup where I don’t want to move it and
any further than I have to the reason I separated the battery from the total weight is
because if the weight of the battery was a concern you could get a lighter battery the
big lithium batteries are still substantially more expensive than lead acid but I think the
prices have been falling a bit in recent years and the lithium battery batteries will be
much much lighter like around 10 pounds uh the total weight of the lifer is 103 pounds or
46.7 kilograms and that’s without the lead acid battery which again is an additional 59 pounds so
why a three times increase in weight from the git and serious well the main thing is the eq 6r
is a good reliable mount partly because they just make it super heavy the mount head alone
is like 40 pounds the tripod is 15 or 16 pounds and then you have 22 pounds of counterweights and
so before we even add my tricked-out telescope we’re at about 77 pounds with the eq 6r the good
the thing about it being so heavy is that makes it more resistant to things like wind and vibration
which can easily ruin astrophotos but the downside of it being heavy is that it’s quite the pain to
move it around I live on a third-floor apartment so bringing all this stuff down and up uh to the
car every night I want to image is a bit of a pain another comparison that I find interesting is you
know from the moment that you start taking the kit out of the car till when you start taking images
of the night sky is all that I’d call setup time so we’re going to compare the setup times that
I recorded for each kit the DIY required little setup is just sort of putting the tracker on the
phone on the tripod very roughly polar lighting you know aiming the phone at the milky way
finding focus so with practice the total for me has is down to eight minutes with that kit
with all these numbers keep in mind that I practice I’m an experienced astrophotographer so
starting don’t try to like match these it’s just a point of comparison between the
different kits keeping it simple required nothing but focus and pointing the camera at the
the milky way so it only took me three minutes to set up the gateway drug required putting it
together balancing polar alignment focusing on finding your target and finding the target was
a bit hard the other night because I forgot all kinds of finder devices so it took me 28 minutes
but I think if I had remembered a finder device I could have brought that down to 20 minutes the
getting a serious kit required putting it together balancing polar aligning setting up the hand
controller performing a three-star alignment and then going to the lagoon nebula but finding
that it was off so then having to really find it and then focusing in total it took me 35 minutes
but with practice and a finder scope, I’m sure that I could probably get that down to like 30
minutes the lifer is the kit that I use most often and so it’s very much in my muscle memory
and I also have tried to make the setup of it as efficient as possible since I do it so often so i
have it down to 16 minutes when I go pretty fast I think the main takeaway from this comparison is
you know especially with the lifer being faster than the middle two is a more complex setup
doesn’t necessarily mean longer setup time because there are a lot of ways that you can make the
setup more efficient and one of those is controlling a lot of things through the computer
can make you faster because plate solving for instance makes finding things so much faster
another comparison that’s semi-related is active time meaning the time that you actively have to
sit there with the kit doing something and I’ll measure this in terms of percentages the DIY er
is 100 active time because I’m actively moving the wheel to track so if I get an hour of data that
means that I’m sitting there for an hour moving the wheel the keeping it simple if you don’t
take any calibration frames and you don’t recenter it’s maybe zero percent but for me, it was five
percent because I did check focus and recenter once with the gateway drug it just depends sort
of on how much you check things like how much you check focus and the tracking is working but I’d
say it’s somewhere between five and ten percent because you’re also I also took calibration frames
it’s the same thing with the getting serious I um you know five to ten percent something
like that, I should point out though that with neither setup did I feel the need to manually do
a meridian flip and then re-center and all that um because it didn’t look like there was any
the danger of running into the tripod legs so I didn’t do a meridian flip but if I had that probably
would have added to that added to the active time it probably would have climbed above 10 percent
with either setup with the lifer as I’ve mentioned everything is automated focusing blah blah blah
so the active time is zero percent and you might be wondering well what about calibration frames i
do those at home with the lifer because everything stays connected so I can even do flats at home so
there’s you know after I get it set up it’s all uh passive I don’t have to worry
about it with that kit okay we’ve made it to the final comparison which is just the actual
images themselves that I took with each kit I’ll quickly show each one full screen and then we
can look at some crops I didn’t try to have any kind of consistent workflow in processing here
I just made them look as best as they could with simple processing techniques like
curves and saturation after I stacked here are some crops now at 100 zooms these are centered on the lagoon nebula
sort of like in my thumbnail for the video and then now here is centered on the trifid nebula again all of these finished photos plus my
unprocessed stacked tiffs for each kit are available at a link in the description and I’ve
also arranged these as kits with affiliate links to each item on kit dot co nebula photos and you
can find that link in the video description as well hope this was helpful to you all out there
since this is a long video you’re now seeing the names of all my Patreon supporters if you want
to be in the credits to any long video like this you can sign up over on patreon.com nebula photos
in addition to having your name in the credits as you’re seeing now, there are lots of benefits to
joining us over on Patreon I organize a monthly imaging challenge which is a lot of fun and
the winning images each month are published on my Instagram and also on an astrobin group i also
do zoom chats where you can ask me questions live we’ve been doing those on Sundays so it’s really
worth your while to sign up so you don’t miss out well till next time this has
been Nico Carver.
Clear Skies!
