 One of the most frustrating things when you're just starting out in DSLR astrophotography is not being able to find the galaxy or nebula you want to shoot. Or even worse, thinking you found it, only to stack your images the next day and realizing you weren't actually pointed at it. In this video, we're going to look at the very best tried and true methods for finding deep sky objects, and then I'll show you a crucial final step that will allow us to confirm we're pointed in the right spot, even when the object is completely obscured by heavy light pollution. Hello, I'm Nico, and this channel is all about helping people learn the amazing hobby of amateur astrophotography. My website is nebulaphotos.com, and if you like what you see, consider joining us over on Patreon, which starts at just $1 per month. So the topic today is something that can be super frustrating, even for me who has been doing astrophotography for several years now, and that's the issue of actually finding and framing up a deep sky object like a galaxy or a nebula that you can't actually see sometimes until you process it on the computer. So how do we find something we can't see? Well, fresh photography through the star patterns, and you can think of star patterns as being sort of like landmarks when giving directions. Just like you could tell someone, when you see the blue house take a left, in the night sky we could say, when you see these three bright stars in a line, that's Orion's belt. So just follow those up this way until you see this triangle of stars, and then you're on your object. And there are two main ways to use the star patterns, and we're going to use them both tonight. The old school, but still very reliable way, is a process called star hopping, which is basically looking at a star atlas or a planetarium app that charts the stars and then looking at your camera in the night sky and finding out what direction you need to move to get closer and closer to your target until you're there. And the hopping part is we use bright stars to make a few hops from one bright star to the next until we're there, and that makes the whole thing a lot easier once you get used to it. And I want to say this is a crucial skill that I'd really encourage everyone to learn. I'm going to be demonstrating it of course in this video, but it's a skill that really rewards actual practice and patience under the night sky. The new school way, which also uses the star patterns, is actually to turn your photo over to some computer software called a plate solver that looks at the image and based on the patterns of the stars solves it, meaning it figures out exactly where in the sky you're pointed. And it will actually label the bright stars and you know galaxies and nebulae that appear in the photo. And so the ultimate solution I found is actually using both methods because we don't want to just be constantly plate solving, that takes a lot of time, so we're going to star hop until we get in the right general direction. And when we think we're pretty close, we'll use plate solving with a free website called astrometry.net to make sure we're really in the right spot. And if needed, we can fine tune from there. Before we jump outside, let me just give you a quick rundown of the kind of gear books, apps, all that kind of stuff that is most helpful for finding objects. And what I'll be using tonight for the demo is a Canon camera and lens on a Skywatch or Star Adventure. But this demo will work with just a fixed tripod, it'll work with different kinds of cameras, you don't need the tracker, so it's really just that's what I'm going to be using to show it. Next up, let's talk about finder devices. And the idea of a finder device is it makes it easier to get immediate feedback of where you're pointed in the night sky. And for star hopping, this is critical because it'll help you to get to that first bright star quickly. So one thing we have here, this is a green laser finder and so it just is a green laser, you can see. So this one is from Scope Stuff and it has the finder shoe attachment so I can easily put it on top of my DSLR just like that. And this is just one example of a finder device you can get. I do like the green laser, but check with your local laws on using them because in some places they're forbidden or illegal and also never use one near a major flight path or when you see an airplane in the sky because you don't want to blind a pilot. On the very inexpensive end, this is a little pricey, we have something else called a red dot finder. This works very similarly, instead of seeing the green light like that, you just see a little red dot in the middle here and you can sight your object easily. And then a little bit more expensive than a red dot finder and quite a bit bigger is a telerad, but this makes a full red target that's really easy to see on the night sky. So this would be more for like a telescope. No matter what kind of finder you use, it's important to make sure it's calibrated so that the finder and the camera lens are actually pointed in the same spot. And I always do this calibration at home with the green laser, you would just, you know, shine the green laser against a wall and then just make sure that it lines up on your camera's view screen right in the center of the live view. If you're using a red dot finder, same idea, you just adjust these little screws until it's all lined up with whatever you have centered on the camera's view screen. Okay, next thing we need is some kind of star chart or sky atlas and I always keep physical paperback star atlases, but mostly as a backup. The truth is I don't use these kinds as much these days because the phone apps just offer so many more features. On the high end I really like Sky Safari Pro. It often goes on sale, so I'd wait for a sale if you haven't purchased it yet, but it just has tons of cool features including letting me have a big database of my gear so I can put overlays which are a field of view to get an idea with different cameras and lenses and telescopes. And I mention this because it can be really useful also for star hopping because you can see exactly how star patterns will look on the screen on your camera's screen. If you do want to do this FOV indicator for free, Stellarium on the computer will do all this too, and I'm going to be doing a Stellarium video pretty soon I think, so I'll talk more about that. But the app I'll be using tonight is a free one. It's called Sky. I think it's Android only, but many apps will do what it does. It's basically just a sky map, and as I move the phone around it uses the phone's compass and gyroscope to figure out roughly where I'm pointed. Now unfortunately I have found this isn't super accurate, just sort of roughly accurate partly because I think any things that metallic or magnetic fields in the area will throw it off and so there are a few things that this app suggests doing to improve the accuracy. One is to wave your phone in a figure eight motion to calibrate the internal sensors in the phone, and the other is it suggests adding alignment points when you know you're centered on certain stars. And so you'll see me doing that in the demo. I'm not sure how much it really helps, but maybe it'll help a little bit. I should also mention in the demo you'll see that my phone is going to be attached in a phone holder thing like this attached to an L bracket right next to the camera. I don't actually recommend this setup. It makes it easier to film what I'm doing, but I think all this metal pieces is throwing off the magnetic compass. So a better way to make a sort of a side by side adapter like this would be purely out of wood and plastic. So I might do that, see if it helps, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. So other than telling us roughly where we're pointed, I can also search in the app for whatever deep sky object we're trying to find. This is where there are lots of differences in the different planetarium apps, both in how many objects they have in their database, and does it require a data connection for the search to work, because some will download the whole catalog, some won't. So I'd suggest evaluating this in different apps before heading out somewhere remote. Another reason I'm willing to pay for Sky Safari Pro is that it's still fully functional without a data connection, and it has a huge database of stars and deep sky objects. But back to the free eye sky, when we want to find something we can just click this little menu icon, click search, and then tonight I'll be demoing Messier 81. So in that case we just click the Messier tab, then search 81, and tap it. And now you may be wondering why not just start with that instead of star hopping. Well I found that that can work okay for really bright, easy to find objects like Andromeda or Orion or the Lagoon, which are sort of easy to find even without a phone, and I've made videos about using it in this basic way. But for harder to find stuff, star hopping will be more reliable, and we can use star hopping in conjunction with this app, and I'll show that in the demo. Okay I'm out on the field. I've just finished polar aligning the star adventurer, and see Polaris is centered on the camera here. I also centered it on the app and with my green laser. And now I'm going to go ahead and loosen up the RA clutch, and then the deck clutch, and get us pointed at our first star in our star hopping, which is going to be Doobie, which is part of the Big Dipper, pretty easy to find. I'm just going to do some fine alignment here with both axes until I get it sort of centered on the DSLR screen, and I'm just turning off and on my laser to do this to know where I'm pointed. Now instead of going to M81, which I could from here, I mean it's hopped to a different star in Ursa Major, because that will give me a feel for sort of how the directions with RA and deck work. So I'm going to go over here to this 23 Ursa Major, and I've gone ahead and found that. So now I'm going to go ahead and head to M81, and I'm just using my app to sort of give me an idea of the direction here. I'm actually going to overshoot a little bit, because I want to show you the fine tuning thing a little bit more. Okay, so I'm going to take a test exposure, just a one second test exposure, and do this at high ISO so I can really see the star as well. And then I'm going to go ahead and get that picture, that test exposure, onto my phone. And I'm going to first show doing this with the Canon Connect app, which is a little bit difficult. You have to put it on its own Wi-Fi network and then go through a couple steps here. It's not too bad. It's gotten a lot better over the years. I'm also going to show a way to do this without Wi-Fi camera connect, so don't worry. I'll show that at the end. So here we go. Here's all the pictures. I can take them in raw and still import them as a reduced JPEG, which is great. That's what I'm going to do here. And now that it's on my phone, I'm going to go ahead and open up, or first I'm going to turn off the Wi-Fi on my phone so that it's connecting back to mobile data. And then I'm going to open up Google Chrome and go to nova.astrometry.net slash upload and click on choose the file. I'll just find it on my phone here under files. It's the most recent file, this JPEG. And I'll upload it to this website. And this is the plate solver. So this is going to actually figure out exactly where I'm pointed right now. And it takes a couple minutes. I'm going to speed up this part of the video. But it'll sort of give you a little update as it goes. And when it's all done plate solving, it will say success, and then give you an option to go to the results. And so we'll go ahead and do that. And here's what we see. And I can see right from this little thing right here that we're not yet on m8192. So how do we know how to get there from here? Well, I'm going to show you one way to do it, which is I'm going to open up the view in Worldwide Telescope option. So over here on the right hand side, click on this link that says view in Worldwide Telescope. And it'll show you something like this, it'll zoom in at first. So just, you know, zoom back out by double finger sort of swipe. And I can see m8182 right there. And I can see there's my camera view screen. The bottom is right there with this pink line. And so I need to move the stars down about one full camera sensor's height to get to m8182. So I find this really useful because it gives me an idea of how the camera's sensor is oriented on the sky. And then I can know which direction I need to move the stars to get to my target. If you're close, that is, if you're further away, then you're going to have to go back to star hopping. But when you're this close, we can just sort of know, okay, if I move in this direction about this far, I'll be right on. So I just have to move the top stars down to the bottom and a little bit off the sensor. And then I'll be right on m8182. So let's figure out the direction we have to do it. And it looks like I have to move in this direction to make the stars go down. So I'm going to go ahead and do that until the star at the top is going right off the bottom of the screen. And then I should be right on m8182. Let me go ahead and take another test exposure at high ISO. And there we go. And again, because we're in this heavy light pollution, I don't know if I can really see 8182 here. But when I plate solve it, yep, there they are right in the middle of the screen as we would expect. Oh, so and then I'm going to go ahead and open it up in worldwide telescope. And I want to show you this little image crossfade thing, because that's pretty cool. So there's this little image crossfaded here at the bottom, the slider. And I can just very quickly see there's m8182. And there's my picture. And you can see that, you know, if you really knew where to look, you could find them in the picture, but they're almost invisible. Because they're really just little these faint smudges and they're quite small at the focal length I'm at. So that gives you an idea. I want to mention the method that I'm going to use here as the last example that we're going to do, which is what to do if you don't have Wi-Fi on your camera so you can't easily transfer images to your phone. This method was shared with me by a 13 year old astrophotographer named Arcturus Astro, who told me about this on a live stream. And so the way we're going to do it is instead of transferring, we're just going to take a picture of our DSLRs screen in playback mode. You want to make sure that if there's any info displayed on the screen that you turn all of that off and you turn off the flash on your camera. And then just get as close as possible. Make sure to tap on the screen so that it focuses there and sets the exposure there. And then go ahead and open that picture up in your app and crop it down so that you just have the screen and nothing else. So we're just going to crop it just like this. Be pretty careful to get as much as we can, but nothing else crop. Perfect. And then click save. And then we're going to upload that to astrometry.net. Of course, the cropped picture that we just took of the screen. And I have tried this a number of times now and it's worked every time. So I'm quite impressed with astrometry.net and this method that was shared to me by Arcturus Astro of just taking a picture of your screen. And I think it's actually what I'll do in the future rather than dealing with the Canon app because this is just really easy and it seems to always work. So that's it for this video. Hope you enjoyed. You can see some of my other videos here linked and also join us on Patreon and make sure to subscribe if you haven't. See you next time.