 Did you know that astrophotographers are cursed? I'm so excited to use my new QHY camera. Let me just check the weather here, clearoutside.com. Yes, the curse of new equipment is real. The weather gods hate us astrophotographers for some reason, so if you get a new camera or a filter or a Star Tracker, expect at least a week of cloud cover. But don't despair, my friend, in this video I'll show you some things to do to make the most out of a cloudy night. Hey everyone, my name is Nico Carver, I'm an amateur astrophotographer, and my website is nebulaphotos.com. If you're new to this channel, please consider subscribing, and for those returning, I'll just throw in a quick reminder here that I do have a Patreon, and I really appreciate all the support that I get on there to keep this channel going. So I have a new camera here. This is the QHY 168C Cooled Color Astronomy Camera, and I haven't had a chance to get it out under the night sky yet because of the curse, but let's just do a quick, really quick unboxing just to show you what comes with this camera. QHY was kind enough to send me this camera for my unbiased review. For those of you who don't know QHY, they make dedicated astronomy cameras like this one, but they make them of all kinds. So guide cameras, my QHY pole master is an example of sort of a specialty astro camera, and they were one of the first companies to really get into CMOS sensors for astrophotography, which is the same kind of sensor that's in your DSLR. And what that's done is it's really lowered the price point to get a dedicated, cooled astronomy camera when compared to like a CCD camera. This camera right here retails for $1,400, and it's APS-C sized chip. So for $1,400 to get a cooled crop sensor chip is amazing. You know, CCD cameras even quite recently, if you only spend $1,400, you're just going to get a really, really, really small chip size. To get those larger chip sizes in CCDs, you're spending thousands and thousands of dollars. If you're brand new to a dedicated astronomy camera, let's talk a little bit about what makes them different from, you know, a consumer camera, a mirrorless or DSLR. Well the first thing you'll notice here is there's no screen on the back. There's no obvious place to put anything in it, because there's no battery, there's no internal battery, there's no memory card. So the thing with this camera is it's basically just a sensor and a cooler, and the electronics to do readout to your laptop. And so you have to use this with a computer. Another thing you'll notice when comparing it to a DSLR is that it's a pretty different shape here, right? It's much longer this way, and it's sort of this can type shape. And so without the mirror in a DSLR, and without like the screen and any kind of consumer camera, you might think that this camera should be super skinny, because it's just like a sensor. But the reason for this bulk, the reason this is still pretty heavy and long like this, is because it needs room for what's called a tech, which stands for thermoelectric cooler. And this one has a dual-stage thermoelectric cooler, and that cooler needs some room to operate. But what that cooler lets you do is it lets you cool this camera's sensor down to a set point temperature. And that's really important, that it lets you not just cool down from the ambient temperature, but to a set point. So you can say, I want to bring it down to exactly negative 10 Celsius, or something like that. And in the case of this camera, you can cool it up to 35 degrees Celsius below the ambient temperature. So if it's 30 degrees Celsius outside, you could bring it down to negative 5 Celsius. Makes sense? And this can make a really big difference in the summer when we're dealing with more thermal noise due to the warm weather. It makes less difference in the winter. But the really great thing about a set point cooler is that it greatly simplifies making a library of reusable calibration frames, especially your master bias and your master dark frames, which I'll show you how to do right now. And basically, it's important with darks that they match the temperature of the lights. And so we might want one temperature for the summer and one temperature for the winter. And so we can create a reusable master dark at negative 5 Celsius and negative 15 Celsius, and then use the appropriate one for all of our imaging. For you, Canon and Nikon and DSLR shooters out there, keep watching or skip ahead because I'm going to show you how to do a reusable master dark library too using the refrigerator. Okay, if you're brand new to astrophotography gear, using a computer to control astrophotography gear, then the first thing you're going to need is the Ascom platform. So if you just Google that, Ascom platform, it will come up here. And basically, it's this really great thing. There's Dylan O'Donnell explaining it that allows different astronomy software and hardware to all work together really well. And so I think it's Windows only. So you do need a Windows computer. If you are not on a Windows computer, you would look into Indie, I-N-D-I. I'll do Indie astronomy. And that works on Linux, Mac, I don't know if it works on Windows, but anyways, it's sort of an alternative to Ascom if you don't have Windows. But it's also pretty interesting. It's open source. It's sort of a different kind of system that they're using. And so you can look into this too. I'm going to use Ascom here. So we're going to download it just by clicking that download button. And then we would install it just the normal way. Okay, the next thing we're going to do after we have Ascom is we're going to Google the camera we just got. So the QHY168C. And I'm just going to follow that up with Driver. And you can see the top result here is the download page for QHY's website. And then we just scroll down until we find the camera we're looking for and click there. We want both the system driver and the Ascom driver. So I'm going to download both of those. There are some other options here. So the reason is because sometimes you might want these other kinds of drivers for different software support. But in my experience just having the system driver and the Ascom driver works pretty well. Oh, and we could have linked out. We found the link to the Ascom platform right there actually too. And they have some other software and things you can download right here like EasyCap and things like that. I'm going to be using Sequence Generator Pro but some of these other ones are good ones to start with that are free. Okay, and then we're just going to download all this, I mean install all these things. And once they're installed then we can start trying to take our darks. Alright now I'm just going to open up Sequence Generator Pro but whichever software you're using just open that up for capture. And I'm just going to clear out whatever is last working on here. And I'm going to go up to Tools, Equipment Profile Manager. And I'm going to make a new profile for this new camera here. So let's call this 168C, negative 10 Celsius at 464 millimeters. Okay, and then from here I'm going to use the QHY CCD cameras capture driver. I'm going to cool that down to negative 10 in 10 minutes. And the other things we would want to set up here are the scale and the readout noise. A good way to find these are if we go back to the QHY website, we were on this download page for the 168C if we click on the specifications page. This has all of the info about the camera. So I'm going to go down here to the readout noise chart. And I'm going to use a gain of 10 right there which gives me a readout noise of 2.5 electrons. So if I go back to SGP, I can put in 2.5 right there. For the scale, that depends on the telescope you're going to use too. So let's look at the pixel size is 4.8 microns. So I'm just going to pull up Blackwater Skies here, the Imaging Toolbox, and just go into this little pixel size thing right here. And what was it? 4.8? Yep. I'll change this to 4.8. 4.8. I'm going to be using a focal length of 464. That's the pixel area 2, 4952, and by 3288. And that has an aperture of 86 millimeters. Let's calculate. So this is my telescope and then this new QHY camera that we're using. And then right over here, it tells me that then I'll be imaging at a scale of 2.13 arc seconds per pixel. So now I can just go back into SGP and type that in 2.13. We'll just leave the angle at zero for now. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and click on cool down on camera connect. And that's good. Let's go ahead and save this. There it is. One more thing we should set here. I'm going to go into one of my other profiles and just copy this naming pattern that I came up with and paste that in. There's a bunch of different options for how to do file naming. And so you're going to want to figure out what works best for you. But there's a little key here that shows you how to do it. And you can also do folder structure with this too just by putting in the slash. All right, let's save this profile again. Click OK. And now we're ready to connect the camera and see if it all works. So I'm going to go ahead and plug it in here. You can hear that the fan comes on immediately when you plug it in. And I'll go ahead and plug the USB in here. And if we go back into Tools Equipment Profile Manager and click on that new profile we created, now if we click on Settings, you can see that this is QHY's Ascom driver. And right here, it's recognizing that the QHY168C is connected right there. And this is a really nice driver and that it has some built-in presets. So for DSO, they suggest a gain of 4 and an offset of 30. So maybe I won't be using gain 10. Let's go back to the website here and see what the readout noise is at gain 4. Gain 4, it's about 2.9 electrons. So let's put that in instead of 2.5, 2.9. Let's go back into Settings and see what else we have here. So there's some other presets. You can also create your own. Sometimes I'll use a higher gain for narrowband imaging and a lower gain for broadband imaging. We also have a binning setting. Since this is a CMOS sensor, you're always just going to want to use, since it's a color sensor especially, just use bin one by one. We have a USB traffic setting. I'm just going to leave that alone unless something goes wrong and then maybe I'll do some Googling to see what to set it to if there's some issue. Everything else, though, seems fine. So let's go ahead and click OK. We now know the camera is connected. So the next step, go ahead and save the profile, is let's make a new sequence with that profile. So we'll go to File, New Sequence with Profile, choose that profile that we just made. And now you can see over here in Equipment, the only thing that is connected is the camera. And that's because we didn't set up any of those other tabs with the other equipment. But since we're just taking darks right now, that's fine. But normally for a full profile, you would set up your mount and your focus or whatever else you have going on. Let's go ahead and connect the camera just by hitting this little Connect button over here. You can see the camera connects right away. Right now it's at a temperature of 25 Celsius and, or no, sorry, it's at about zero, but it's been cooling for a little while. The cooler is running at around 20 to 25% power, which is good. I usually don't like to see the cooler running too far above, let's say, 50% power because I've just noticed with these camera coolers, the closer you're getting to 100%, the riskier it gets that it'll just drop out or fail. So I try to keep it under 50% if I can. But cooling to negative 10 Celsius should be perfectly fine. That's definitely cool enough. If we go back to the QHY website, they have a chart here showing dark current versus temperature, and you can see at 15 degrees Celsius, 0.0376 electrons per pixel, when by the time we get to negative 10, it's at 0.0012 electrons per pixel. So it really drops that dark current or thermal noise way down by cooling to negative 10. We could even bring it down just a bit further at negative 15, so we might do a dark library at negative 15 or even negative 20, too, especially for the cooler months. Since we set in the equipment profile manager to cool down over 10 minutes, it's taking its time to cool the camera down. But while it's doing that, let's set up our sequence here. For target, I'm just going to call this, let's say, 3-minute darks. Set up a new directory, let's do this on my desktop, and call this QHY168C3-MinuteDarks. It has this naming structure that we set up in the profile. So that's carried over. Let's go down to our imaging plan here, click Run, click, we want to take darks under Type. Filters should be set to None. For exposure, I'm going to do 180 for 180 seconds, which is equivalent to 3 minutes. And for repeat, I'm going to do 25. Okay, now we just have to wait for it to finish cooling down. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the lights here and turn my laptop screen away from the camera just to make sure that if there, I don't think there are any light leaks, but if there were any, this would really, the camera is really in the dark. So we're not going to get any stray light coming in and messing up our darks. Actually, one more thing before we take a little break here. If you haven't done bias frames yet, you could do those right now too, just by clicking the next event down, event two, choosing bias, and it automatically sets the exposure time to zero seconds. But even though it sets to zero seconds, it's actually going to take the shortest exposure possible for the camera. And I'm going to go ahead and set that to 50. Since we only take bias frames once, I usually do a lot of them. 50 to 100 is typical. 10 minutes are up and so it's cooled down to negative 10 and you can see that it's basically just staying there within 0.1 degrees of negative 10 at 47% cooler power, not 48, but still a little bit under 50%, which is what I'm comfortable with. You may be comfortable running the cooler at slightly higher power, I'm not sure. But I try to keep it under 50%, which from room temperature, so about 20 Celsius here in the house, down to negative 10, so it's a 30 degree drop, it's running at 48% power. Okay, so let's go ahead and save this sequence, just call it three minute darks, 168C, just in case we have to come back to it. And then we can go ahead and hit run sequence. And you can see it starts going right away because we don't have to wait for any kind of auto-guider or anything like that. Typically you have more things connected with the sequence, but I actually like having a profile that's fairly simple for doing things just like this, like taking flats and darks and things like that, where you don't have to get errors because you don't have all this stuff connected. Anyways, I'll speed this up a little bit to the point where we are seeing our dark. Okay, so we now have a dark frame that's come in here. The reason it looks gray rather than dark is because I turned on this auto-stretch here and put it on high, so that takes the image and tries to stretch it as far as it can basically. If we, it looks fairly uniformly gray, but if we zoom in, we can see there are hot pixels and a little bit of, you know, non-uniformity here in the pixel response, which is typical. That's what we want to see in a dark. But if we zoom all the way out, what's interesting about this dark is there's no visible AMP close on any of the corners. So that's something that often plagues dedicated CMOS astronomy cameras. Two HYA claims that they have some anti-AMPLO technology, and it seems to be working well on this dark. We can also look at the image statistics here. To keep in mind, these are 16-bit, so you have to scale it to 14-bit in this case. Yeah, so anyways, this is working well. We can now just leave it to take all of our darken bias frames. If there was an issue with a light leak, you would be able to see it here. So for instance, if I took this slider and moved it over, you can see when I do that now, the image just goes completely black. If there was any kind of light leak, you would be able to see that in the image. It would be pretty obvious. We know that the body cap and everything is working. We're not having any light leaks in our darks here. So I'm confident in this. I'm going to let it continue the sequence and take 25 darks, 50 bias. And that's the basic premise of building a dark library. You then can do it with a different temperature if you want. If you think you're going to be using different temperatures, you can do it with different gains, different exposure times. So maybe three minutes is something you do often, but then do it for four minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes. Any kind of sub-exposure time you're going to use. And you build up your dark library that way and turn them into stacked master dark frames that you can just reuse over and over again. Let's turn now to doing this with a DSLR. Okay, I'm now here with my fridge to show you about making a dark library with your DSLR or mirrorless camera. And there are a number of ways to do this. You could also go outside. Right now it's actually raining, so I don't want to bring my camera and laptop outside. So I'm going to use the fridge and freezer. But the basic idea is that we're going to gradually cool down our DSLR from the room temperature, which is right now about 21 degrees Celsius, down to the fridge temperature and then down to the freezer temperature, then back to the fridge and then back to ambient temperature. And all the while taking dark frames. And what we'll end up with is a bunch of different darks at different temperatures. And then we'll group those. So we'll have, you know, five that are from 20 to 15 Celsius, five that are from 15 to 10 Celsius, and so forth. And we'll do this a few times, this cycle. Maybe we can get it done in one night, but probably it'll take multiple nights to get enough dark frames at different temperatures to build good master darks. And I usually just average around a five degree range. Hope that makes sense. We'll see it in practice right now. So I have my Canon DSLR. I have a tether cable for it. And then I have my laptop and I have it open to backyard EOS. And the reason that I'm using this software called backyard EOS is because it records the sensor temperature from the exit data from the camera. There might be other programs that do this too, but the only one that I know of is backyard EOS. So that's the one I'm using. The way this is going to work is I'm just going to turn on my camera here. I'm going to plug it into the laptop. It recognizes it as the Canon 5D Mark III. I'm then going to click connect on backyard EOS and say I'm using a newer Canon camera. It pulls up the camera right here. And then I'm just going to create my imaging plan right over here in the lower right. So I'm going to save to PC. I'm going to call this 90 second darks because I often shoot 90 second subframes with this camera. I'm going to save to PC. That's fine. Down here I'm going to change the number of exposures to 100. I'm going to change the type to dark. I'm going to change the shutter speed to, or I'm going to leave it on bulb, but change the duration to 90 seconds. And I'm going to leave the ISO on 1600 because that's an ISO I often shoot with. I could repeat the whole process for 800 because once in a while I do shoot ISO 800 as well with this camera. Okay, so now what it's going to do is it's going to take 100 dark frames at 90 seconds each as soon as we hit start capture. And really this is it. What we can do now is we can hit start capture. We can let it take one, you know, at this temperature, room temperature. This would be a good, you know, temp for a really hot summer night. And then we're going to put it in the fridge and it'll start cooling down and we're going to hit all of these different temperatures as it starts cooling down. After a while has passed, maybe half an hour, 45 minutes, and it's stabilized at the fridge temperature, then we can move it up to the freezer. I would never recommend going straight from room temperature to the freezer and then back out. I'd always do this sort of fridge to freezer, freezer to fridge and then back out so that you're not sort of shocking the system too much. But both of these things, the camera and the laptop should be just fine at freezer temperatures because I've had these out in a much colder environments even than the freezer. So they've held up fine. Again, another way to do this, if it wasn't raining, is I could just, if I had some safe space to put them outside, I could do it that way too. Okay, let's go. So here's my fridge. I had to clear some room here on the bottom shelf for this example. And you can see that there is a light on right now. That light does shut off, and I think this is in most all fridge models to save energy. That light shuts off when you close the fridge. There's a little switch right there that gets pressed on. So once we close the door and with that light off, it'll be quite dark, dark enough in the fridge that with a camera with the body cap on, you shouldn't have any light leaks and get really good quality darks. Okay, there we go. It's now started. I'm going to go ahead and close the door here. And again, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to wait about 45 minutes before moving both the laptop and the camera up to the freezer. Let it go up there for 45 minutes, bring it back down. At some point, we might have to charge the batteries. That's one downside with this plan is both the laptop has a battery and the camera has a battery. So I would recommend starting fully charged, at least with my laptop and camera, I can get multiple hours, three or four hours out of them. I finished the first round of taking these darks by going from the ambient temperature. So over the ambient temperature, I mean, of about plus 20 Celsius means that the sensor was at around plus 28 Celsius. And then you can see as it cooled down in the fridge, it got cooler and cooler. And then at some point, I moved it to the freezer and then it got colder still. And about the coldest it got was negative six Celsius. So what do we do with this stuff now? What do we do with all these files? Again, I'm not going to show the whole process of making master darks, but I just want to show you sort of the file organization part of this technique. What I do next is, so these are all 90 second darks. That's the top level folder. Within that folder, I'm going to make another folder. And I'm going to call it negative five two zero C. Okay, and now that folder's up here at the top. And then all I'm going to do is I'm going to take all of the darks that fit that criteria of negative five to zero and move them into that folder, right? And I guess since negative six was the bottom, I'm just going to cheat and move those in too. And then we'll continue with that. So then we'll make another new folder and we'll call this plus one to plus five C. And then we'll take all of the ones that are plus one plus five and move those into that folder. And we'll just continue down the list going in five degree increments. And then once we've gathered at least let's say 20 darks in each folder, we'll integrate each one into a master dark and get rid of the individual sub exposures. And in each folder, we'll just have one master dark that represents that basic temperature range of about five degrees Celsius. And then that will become our reusable master dark library. But this could be just the start, right? Because we've only done 90 second darks. And I should add 90 second darks ISO 1600. But you may be the kind of imager that takes all kinds of different sub exposure lengths of different ISOs. So your master dark library might get a lot more complex with more top level folders like three minute darks at ISO 800 and five minute darks at ISO 400 and so forth. So that's really up to you. It's also up to you how big a temperature range you want to allow. If you really have a lot of patience, you'll get more accurate calibration, of course, if you narrow this down. So if you went by every degree, for instance, then you're approaching the accuracy that you can get with set point cooling. So it's really all up to you. I'm comfortable with doing it every five degrees, at least for my own sanity. Okay, hopefully that was helpful. We're going to move on to the next tip. Something else we can do on a cloudy night is learn about the hobby of astrophotography. And you're doing that right now by watching this video. But this hobby definitely rewards doing research and all kinds of different research. I'm a research librarian professionally. So this is something that I probably naturally like and excel at. But for those who don't have a research background, I'm going to give you a few tips here. First off, for beginner information, there is a lot of free stuff out there. Like you're watching me right now on YouTube for free. There are many other YouTubers who cover astrophotography very well too. And there's also forums and subreddits and lots of places where you can find knowledgeable people, people that are willing to help. These websites, forums, they can be great if you have like a specific question. But one of my issues with this kind of free information, if you're just browsing it, is that it can be both scattershot, like little bit here, little bit there, and a bit overwhelming in how much information is out there. So a lot of times this leaves me feeling like, well, I don't really have a full sense of what I need to do. I just have this piece of information, this piece of information. I don't know how to connect them together. This is where a mentor can really help. If you have an astronomy club near you, finding a local mentor or an astrophotography group is really your best bet. You can also find this kind of one-on-one help online. For instance, I do offer it on my Patreon at the $10 level if you're interested. And lastly, as a librarian, I would be remiss if I didn't mention books. I have many books on astrophotography and they're all wonderful and valuable in different ways. I'll probably do a full video eventually on my favorites. But I think reading books on astrophotography is a wonderful way to spend a cloudy night. My last tip for astrophotography on a cloudy night is to actually go out and try shooting. This may seem counterintuitive, but if there are even short patches of clear sky, you might be surprised by the results you could get even if it's semi-cloudy. And I'll just share a few of my past cloudy night surprises here. Just when I was just too stubborn to give up. I'll start with the oldest one. This was taken about six years ago before I really had any astrophotography gear to speak of. I just had a cheap Canon zoom lens on my DSLR. I thought the moon looked interesting sort of in the clouds as they were passing over it. And I'll just show this is how it looked to begin with. And then with a bit of processing and Adobe Camera Raw, I can get a sort of HDR effect that I think makes it look a little bit like a painting. And I really still value this image. I find the cloud formations around that crescent moon really entrancing to look at. They just made it into a very interesting composition. Here's another one. This was taken just last summer on a very hazy, partly cloudy night. I had to sort through about 500 frames and remove, I think, over half. So I was left with only about 200. And in those 200s, hundreds of them, the clouds just completely obscured this whole field. But on the remaining frames, it was interesting. There's a haziness over the hiades that gives it this really interesting bloated look on the stars. And it's not so much in the Pleiades. So I thought that gave it a really interesting look and made the image unique. And I still like this image. And it also really brings me back to that night. That's another interesting thing with clouds and hazes that you really remember those nights. Here's a recent one where I was trying to shoot M101 without a tracker for my backyard. This was just this past week and it was predicted to be perfectly clear night. But of course, after I started finishing setting up, the clouds started rolling in. I kept the camera going, perhaps out of spite about those clouds. And in any case, I just decided to keep it going and turn this into a little time lapse. And it's sort of interesting just to watch those clouds move with the stars. And this final one, one more is just another video that some of you may have already seen. It was I was considering not even going out for the Venus Pleiades conjunction because of clouds and cloud cover. But I'm so glad that I did because I was able to catch the International Space Station and the conjunction of Venus and the Pleiades in real time with my camera during a short break in the clouds. If it had been a few minutes earlier or later, this would have been completely obscured. But I just got this little break right as the ISS was passing through and I thought that was so cool. So it was just another case where the clouds actually made that event really memorable because it was so lucky that I had a break in the clouds right as that was happening. Okay, hopefully this video has given you some new ideas of some things to try out on those dreaded cloudy nights. And if you have other ideas, please leave them in the comments. Until next time, this is Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com, wishing everyone clear skies.