 Hey, my name is Nico and today I'm gonna do a giveaway and Q&A to celebrate 50,000 subscribers on YouTube This video is not sponsored all the stuff I'm giving away are things I bought myself to use for making videos in the past year on YouTube and now I'm giving Those things away to you. There are five prizes. You can choose to either win a sky adventurer Star adventurer pro pack This is a very nice star tracker set up and the only reason I'm giving this one away is I bought a new one that has the Wi-Fi control, but this one works just as well. Honestly, the Wi-Fi is pretty unnecessary I'm also giving away a stock Canon 6TD with two lenses Just a cheap zoom lens and a nifty 50 f 1.8 prime lens This is a great starter camera and lens so you could just get a tripod and start shooting a Ryan Nebula with it For the more experienced astrophotographers, I'm giving away three different two-inch light pollution filters We got the Optalong L Pro The Astronomix CLS and the Esfiboni CLS The full details and rules for the giveaway are in the description There's two links, but listen up right now for how to enter To enter you need to fill out the first link the Google form that's linked right below in the description That Google form is password protected and the password is going to be given out one letter or number at a time Throughout this video just like this in the corner So the first letter in the password is capital N Just open up a note app or some scratch paper and watch the video to get the full password If you try to share the password in the comments, I will delete your comment please fill out the form in the next week for a chance to enter and you only get to Enter to win one thing. So please pick what you will actually use One thing to consider is I'm guessing there's gonna be less competition To win a filter. So I'm just gonna because I'm just gonna pick randomly So your odds are based on how many people enter the giveaway and pick that item So your odds will probably go down if you choose the Star Tracker. Okay enough said about that Let's answer some of the questions you sent me. I got so many good questions So I'm just gonna have to pick some I'm gonna start with the question I got the most and I think mr. Krotowski summed it up well here How did you get started with astrophotography? What were your first gear and results and what were you struggling most at the beginning? Just give us a full Nico story. I'm gonna tack on one more question here Which is another comment when I got which is just sort of what's your best beginner advice? Because I think it's related to all of this So let's start back at the beginning I first got interested in the world of night photography in 2014 so seven years ago now I was visiting Iceland in the winter with the hope of seeing the Aurora Borealis the northern lights and at that time I was really into time-lapse photography as a hobby Here's some of my time-lapse shots from that trip And I was I was lucky enough to shoot their Aurora as a time-lapse to and it wasn't until Months later that occurred to me to actually edit a single photo from that time-lapse And when I was just playing around with that image in Photoshop So this was like the spring of 2015 now. I found wow There's so much here if I just brighten up the photo and play around with it And that was that light bulb moment for me that really got me hooked initially So I stuck with wide-angle stuff I was using Canon 5d looking on lenses on a tripod for about a year And I got some okay milky way shots like this But eventually in my research about this I stumbled on the deep-sky astrophotography Which I was intrigued me and I started hemming and hawing and delaying getting started because I wasn't sure I could afford it I didn't want to buy a telescope right away, but I found You know a tracker and that maybe I could do that and in January of 2016 I got a used astrotrack star tracker and on my first night out in January I got this picture of Orion and I was blown away the fact that I could see those colors from the city That was the moment where my mind was blown and I knew this hobby was what I was looking for Since then I really spent almost all of my free time and money towards getting better and better at it In terms of what I was struggling most at the beginning. I'd say the new equipment rabbit hole Basically, this is how this rabbit hole works. You go out Something isn't working. You become frustrated. You give up on imaging that night You go online and some person trying to help from their experience says oh well You just need this new gadget auto guiding or whatever it is and your your problem will be solved so you go buy some more equipment you wait for another clear night and Even if that new gadget fixed your first problem, which it probably didn't you now have a bunch of new problems And you still haven't produced any images and so this is a pretty common experience for the deep-sky astrophotographer It's what happened to me and my advice to get out of that rabbit hole is is not that we can never buy Any new gear of course the gear is fun. It's part of the hobby But my advice is don't add anything new until you feel confident that you've mastered and reached the limit of what you have So if you're having a problem, I always first try to solve it creatively with what you have That's gonna allow you to build a good foundation for your astrophotography and teach you how to problem solve Which is way more valuable than owning a bunch of expensive equipment that you don't know how to use properly Okay, astronaut yet asks in some photos I see a few stars with a very spiky pattern while other stars in the same photo look like blobs Is that an optical effect of the lens or telescope or can we deliberately achieve something like that? Answer to that is yes, and yes, it is something that's caused by the telescope or lens, but you can also Create them. They're called diffraction spikes and they will appear on bright stars While they're also on dimmer stars They're usually too dim to see in the case of a Newtonian telescope like this one They're caused by these spider veins holding in the secondary mirror in the case of a camera lens They only appear when you stop down the lens using internal aperture blades because that that iris isn't perfectly round You won't see diffraction spikes on refractor telescopes typically or lenses when they are wide open when the aperture is wide open So if you want to create them in those cases you can tape Something really thin like dental floss or fishing line to the front of your lens or refractor telescope Okay, Marco asks how do you manage the change in sleep cycles when spending the nights outside? Well me personally not well I'm I'm the kind of person who just stays out all night working the whole time on various setups and things for YouTube or You know my personalized photography and then I just lose out on that night's sleep Or maybe I get home and I can get a couple of hours as the Sun is rising I really want to get better at this now that I'm you know getting older and Things but with my style of imaging. I'm just not sure realistically I'll get that much better at getting more sleep until Something really changes in my life like I get an observatory in a dark sky or something like that But not anytime soon Okay, Toshall asks I have a 60 millimeter refractor with an alt as mount which I use for astrophotography Along with my phone if I want to get better pictures. Do I change my telescope or my camera? If so any recommendation so in this particular case, I'd recommend upgrading the camera first I would recommend, you know, you can enter my giveaway or you can buy try to get a used Canon or Nikon DSLR With the lens and you can attach that to the alt as mount to do some basic tracking You know 20 30 second exposures and get much better deep-sky photos that way Phone cameras are getting better, but they're still very small sensors compared to a DSLR and by shooting through the eyepiece also Because you have the lens on the phone. You're losing a lot of potential light compared to Doing it other ways Now the caveat if you already own a telescope and you're thinking of attaching a DSLR to it in what we call prime focus Then not that doesn't always work on cheap telescopes I do a little bit of research on Google for some telescopes are really not designed to work with a camera in prime focus especially Newtonians like this one often don't have enough inward travel on the focus or to reach focus with the DSLR So before you buy a DSLR to work with your telescope make sure it will work Pullman watch tech asks how do you take astrophotos during wintertime when it is like negative 10 degrees Celsius and snow How to protect equipment is it necessary and is the settings different? okay, so mostly it's the same and You get free camera cooling from the the low temperatures which always helps with noise Especially if you're using a DSLR or mirrorless camera a couple tips I have is give yourself some extra time because everything takes longer in the snow and cold You don't want to rush because that's when you might make mistakes Put on way more layers than you think is necessary like just really overdo it because when you're just sitting out there in the cold not Generating any body heat you will get insanely cold All batteries, but especially in phones and laptops have noticed don't last as long So be prepared for that extra batteries external battery banks anything like that if setting up your tripod in the snow I'd suggest bringing a shovel and digging out little holes in the snow for where the tripod feet goes because snow will compress over time and It's just not very stable compared to solid ground So I'd always dig out the snow and put your tripod on that another reason to do that If I've had tripod feet come off in the snow and then they're basically impossible to find until snow melts Okay, JJ from Long Island, New York asks Do you have any suggestions for some wide field targets during galaxy season? Other than the more popular ones for those that don't know a galaxy season is roughly March through May in the Northern Hemisphere But the problem is and it's just means when the earth you know We in the Northern Hemisphere have this good view of a lot of galaxies But the problem is that most galaxies are very small. So they don't look that good in wide fields like with a camera lens and so my suggestion is to stay up late or Wake up early and start shooting the many great wide fields in one of my favorite constellations, Cygnus Which rises surprisingly high even as early as March for us in here in the north Yeah, you just need to be up at the right time, which is around 3 a.m. Or so, but that's my advice Okay, me. Hello asks, why are you doing YouTube? Basically just because I enjoy it pretty much every aspect of it I I most of all it's I really like the feeling of helping other people But also I have a lot of past experience with videography and editing and I like those things It's nice to keep those skills active and I hope to do more creative videos in the future Okay, I know I only got to a very small percentage of the questions But thank you very much if you submitted a question I have saved all of them and I'll be using them to help me generate new video ideas or Just to incorporate them into future videos So hopefully your question will get answered eventually just keep watching this channel Okay, this is the end of the video now, but remember to enter the giveaway you should hopefully have the full password now and Subscribe to this channel if you haven't till next time. This has been Nico Carver from Nebula photos calm