 Tonight, I'm going to prove you can capture extremely faint, challenging nebulae with just Canon's starter DSLR and kit lens on a Star Tracker, and I'm going head-to-head with Astro Backyard in this challenge. You'll see I have a few tricks up my sleeve like electrical tape. Oh boy. So this is a five minute exposure and I still can't see my nebula. This either could be genius or Trevor's going to wipe the floor with me. Man, I've never been so like scared to show one of my images. I'm going to get some tips for imaging in the winter. I really hate shoveling frozen snow. Okay, I'm in the car. I'm about to drive down to a spot in Rhode Island where I know it's dark because I've been there before, but it's also supposed to be both clear and still tonight according to the forecast. All right, I've arrived here in Rhode Island and the first issue is that we have some snow to deal with. In my experience, I've always had better stability when I actually have the tripod feet touching the ground. It really does feel still tonight. I don't feel or hear any wind and that's very good because I'm going after a very faint object. So I'm going to try to push my exposure so that I can get the histogram on the back of the camera, at least about one third over from the left. That's a good rule of thumb, but from a dark site like this, it can be hard to achieve and still have round stars on a Star Tracker. So I'm going to work extra hard to dial in balance and polar alignment to make sure I can really push the exposure like this. Okay, time for polar alignment and first off, here's a new secret weapon of mine. The folks at Hunt's Photo and Video sent me this Mini Max stool and it's an ingenious stool for astrophotographers because it has multiple positions that you can put it in and the lowest position is quite low like this, which is great position for polar aligning. So now I don't have to actually sit on the cold ground. I can just put this down and have a nice stool. Hunt's was kind enough to give a discount for viewers of this channel, so if you'd like one of these stools, you can get a nice discount and the link is in the description. Okay, here's the thing with polar alignment that I think confuses a lot of people, especially with the Star Adventure and other trackers, where once you loosen this RA clutch and you go to your target, you can see the whole polar scope rotates with the RA axis. So why is this an issue? Well, let's say you have polar alignment completely dialed in here, you know, I'm facing the North Celestial Pole, but then I moved to target and I recheck my polar alignment and it's confusing, right? Because the whole reticule has rotated. But this is the key thing, has Polaris actually moved because it shouldn't have. If you didn't bump them out, even when you do this, Polaris will actually be in the same position in the circle. All that's happened is the circle has rotated because you've rotated the reticule. Okay, so this is one thing to understand conceptually, but here comes the actual tricky part, which is getting a good polar alignment, then moving everything, so you're lined up with your target and not having bumped the polar alignment out. There's two keys to this. One is good balance. So you can see how this is very well balanced. I can move it around and nothing down here is moving. The second is don't over tighten these clutches, right? So we just need these to be just sort of finger tight here. And then when we get them, when we get it to the right position, again, we just need to go just finger tight and then just a little bit more, no need to over tighten them. The same thing with this clutch up here. This one's even trickier, I think. I think I have it too tight right now. But the cool thing about the declination is we have these slow motion controls here. The next thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to tape down the zoom exactly how I want it with a bright electrical tape. This lens does not have a zoom lock. So this is necessary if you want to avoid the zoom drifting just from gravity or from accidentally bumping it when checking focus. So I'm just going to find 105 here. And then I'm going to go ahead and tape that down. So that's sort of like a lock. OK, now that I have that taped, I went ahead and got my do-heater strap. This one's USB-powered. So I have a little USB battery that I can use it with. And this just makes it so that we can be sure that the lens isn't going to frost up here. This is especially important with this lens since it doesn't have a lens hood, which does provide some protection against doing frost. Lastly, I have this little cheap Bodnov mass for focusing. It's not at all designed for this focal length of 105 millimeters. You can see the spacing on the pattern is pretty coarse. But it will do OK for me tonight because my object is right next to the Brightstar Rigel. That might give you a clue. And with a Brightstar, even a non-ideal Bodnov mask like this one will still work. I'm just going to probably end up taking one second test exposures to get the pattern bright enough. Tonight, I'm using a wireless intervalometer. Wired ones work well, too. But with a wired one, I usually need to figure out a way to make sure that there's no possibility of the cable catching on something and ruining the exposure. And this time, I'm just going to eliminate that possibility by using my wireless intervalometer. I did put fresh batteries in it to make sure. Speaking of batteries, I only have one for the Canon T7. So we should get to shooting because batteries don't last as long in the cold weather. And I already feel behind. So let's take our real first test exposure. So this is a five-minute exposure. And I still can't see my nebula. This either could be genius or Trevor's going to wipe the floor with me. I think it's going to be OK, though. I just have to remain confident in my plan for this challenge. Let me show you the histogram here. We just go to Playback and click the Display button. You can see this is how I evaluate exposure and know if I've exposed long enough in a single light or single sub-exposure. With a tracker, you want to get this histogram peak at least off the left-hand side of the chart. And ideally, you want it somewhere between one quarter and one-half over from the left. I'm going to really try to get as many photons on the object as I can in each exposure, which is why I'm exposing to one-third. And we'll just have confidence that when we stack and stretch it, it will be there. All right, the battery's on one bar. We've gotten about three hours out of it so far. So I'm pretty pleased. I'm going to stop now, though, and take some flats. I'm going to take the bias in dark frames later after I can charge the battery because I think that the temps have been pretty good night to night. So it's more critical to take the flats right now so I can capture this exact zoom and focus position as it is. And to take the flats, I'm just going to put this tablet with a white screen on top very carefully. I'll get that histogram peak about half over, which is a good flat for a DSLR. And once we have that dialed in, I'll take about 30 flats. So I'm just going to place this very carefully while holding the zoom position, just like that. And then I'm going to pull up my intervalometer and get in some kind of position here to do this. I don't think I can film at the same time, but I'll figure it out. We're now going to look at some highlights from a great conversation I had with Trevor Jones, also known as Astro Backyard, about this kit lens challenge. And I'm going to occasionally pause our conversation to emphasize or elaborate on something that we're talking about. So if you've already seen some of these clips in Trevor's video, you can think of this as watching it with the DVD commentary track turned on. Hey, Nico, how's it going, man? Hey, I'm good. I just got back from shooting my deep sky object with the kit. I did the same. Actually, the turnaround for how quickly we were able to use this setup after it arrived was surprising, especially for the weather I've been getting lately. I actually got to use it. I think it was about four days after it arrived. Yeah, yeah, just a few days after. And it was also just good timing because it was a night where I got in my imaging time before the moon rose. I think I did like 9 PM to midnight. And that was right before the moon rose at around 1 AM. OK, the moon thing. This is something that I don't talk enough about on my channel, and I'm going to try to do a better job of it. The moon is basically just like another light pollution source. So if you go to a dark site during full moon, you're really not capitalizing on that dark sky because the moon is like a big spotlight in the sky, basically. And the closer your deep sky object is to the moon in the sky, the worse it'll get. And you'll have really bad gradients and all kinds of problems. There are solutions for imaging during the moon. The most effective is using an H-alpha narrowband filter because the moonlight is broadband and is very blue. And so if you're imaging in the deep reds, you can mostly avoid the effects of moonlight. But that's just getting into sort of an advanced topic. This is about beginner stuff. So the best solution is just to, when you're going after faint objects with a DSLR, try to shoot them either before the moon has risen, which is what both Trevor and I did, or after it's set, or during new moon. So one interesting thing about using this lens is that some zoom lenses have a lock, a focus lock. So basically it's just a little switch, just like autofocus or manual focus, but it just locks the focus position. This lens doesn't have that. So I can just push the lens like that and it changes the focus position, right? So to prevent that, one thing I always have in my bag when I'm out shooting is electrical tape and usually have a bright color like this so I can see it in the dark. And I just tape the lens. So I just tape it so that it can't move. So funny story about that, I too have a blue electrical tape that I keep in my little bag of gear stuff at all times for many reasons, whether it's taping a power outlet in or something, you always need tape. And I knew that going in. I even wrote in my notes, tape the lens down, the focal length, because yeah, it doesn't take much to lose it. I totally forgot, I framed up my target, got the focal length that I wanted, did not tape it, continued to shoot for three hours, adjusting focus, all these situations where I could have easily knocked it out got so lucky that I didn't. So as the battery was dying on that one bar left, I was like, oh, should I take a few more exposures or should I start taking darks right now? Temperature matched darks. As I thought about that, I knocked the focal length. I'm like, oh my God, like that's it. I'm done for the night because I've changed the focal length. There's no way I'll get it back other than eyeballing it to where it was. And I was like, wow, I could have really screwed myself because I didn't tape it. And I really should have. So did you get flats? Like no, took no flats. Oh, wow. That's interesting. I just wanna point out here that Trevor wanted to take flats. It's just that he couldn't because he didn't tape his lens and the zoom position changed. So there's a big difference. Flats are always a good thing to do, even with a clean lens. There may be a little bit less necessary if you're sure there's no dust in your system but there's still always a really good thing to do. They're one of my favorite calibration frames in terms of the difference they make. But if you don't have the same conditions that you have when you're taking your light frames, your pictures of the night sky, for when you take your flats, then they could do more harm than good. So that's why Trevor, once the lens zoom position changed, was just like, well, now I can't take flats because it's very important that you have the exact same system optically and with a lens like this, where it doesn't have any kind of stops, there's no way to know how to get back to that exact same position you were in before. So flats are difficult. I'm not going to like sure code it and say that for a beginner, flats are just the easiest thing. But I feel that once you sort of develop your own system for taking flats and doing it correctly, then it becomes pretty easy and routine. So one video idea that I want to do is all about flats and different ways to take them so that you can find a system that's easy for you and that works for your system so that you don't have to worry about flats and whether they're going to mess up your pictures because really they should only help if they're done correctly. Okay. One thing about using a new kit for the first time in doing a real project and not testing, because like I'm such a tester, usually what I would do if I got a new lens or something is I would do test shots at different focal ratios to see how the star performance changed. And I didn't do that at all this time. So I was just flying blind thinking, okay, I'm just going to let in a bunch of light and see what happens. Yeah, it was interesting. I will say I found out that I actually had used this lens, I sort of forgot about it because I must have sold it, but actually my first tracked deep sky photo was with this lens. So I got to show that to you because I think you'd get a kick out of it. That's really cool. Yeah, because it is a kit lens, one of my first DSLRs came with it and I actually tried to use it for nature photography, which if you can imagine a lens this slow at 300 millimeter in the daytime trying to capture a bird flying by, like it was the epitome of frustration, a lot of blurry photos of robins and birds that I saw around me. Yeah, it was a terrible lens for any type of nature photography. That actually brings up a really good point. A lot of people think if they're coming from one style photography to astrophotography that they know about a lens, like they're like, oh, this is a great lens. They try it out for the stars and it sucks, you know? It's like, there's often just no correlation between like this superb L glass lens for daytime and you bring it under the stars and there's just huge coma, you know, there's like all the stars turning to little seagulls and things and you just have no idea until you test it. That's right, yes. All the value in a lot of those expensive lenses is for what it can do in the daytime and the quick focusing and all that stuff that doesn't apply to astrophotography at all. One thing I do like is that, you know, some lens makers are thinking about astrophotography now. I think maybe because we all sort of came and started buying their lenses, then they've now started marketing lenses to astrophotographers, which I think is cool. Like Rokinon does it a little bit and Sigma too. Yep, those fast manual lenses. Yeah, it's perfect for us. Yeah, cool. So I guess I could say the F-ray shield that I shot with. And so I stopped down to F 6.3 on the 75 to 300 millimeter lens. How about you? Did you shoot wide open or did you stop down as well? I shot wide open. Yeah, I mean, this might give another clue, but I wanted as many photons on this object as possible. And so I didn't want to stop down. And also my style of processing, I know that I can deal with stars being a little wonky. So I'm less concerned about stopping down to get really good star performance because I know that I'd rather sort of deal with it in post-processing because I'm a very like heavy post-processer. I do a lot on the image. That's a great point. So the settings that you choose, others might say, well, you know what? I think it would be better if you did this, but it's like, well, no, based on my processing style, you'd rather sacrifice some star bloat for more photons on your sounding like a very faint deep sky object. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I figured stopping down one stop might sharpen things up a little bit because I was scared these stars were gonna be really, really bad. And I was pleasantly surprised at the fact that they weren't, they were totally acceptable, especially considering this is a very budget lens. Even though everything that Trevor and I are talking about in this section is correct, I do think that once you get some experience with astrophotography, you'll realize what works for you and what style of processor you are. On the other hand, with this particular lens, I think Trevor was completely right in retrospect after we saw each other's images to stop it down a stop. Okay, I guess it's time to show you my picture. And I spent about, I would say about five hours processing, maybe a little more, a lot yesterday, a lot, like a little bit more this morning with a fresh pair of eyes. And I've honestly, I've been staring at it for too long. So hopefully when you see it for the first time, you'll be amazed, but I think I'm just tired of looking at it at this point. But I can at least say that, I've done pretty well for the amount of data that I actually collected. Okay, so I'm gonna share my screen now. Nice, wow. Did we shoot the same target? Yes, we did shoot the same target. Come on. We took a very, okay, and we took very different takes on it, which I am so glad about. And yours looks amazing though, Trevor. This is really well done. I appreciate that. And this is also my biggest fear that we'd have a direct head-to-head comparison of my processing skills versus yours because I know you're gonna win that battle. Oh no. No, I just think they're just very, they're just very differently. I went for a different scene and I also tried to bring out the other stuff there that I really shouldn't have because my picture got so noisy because I was going after stuff that's actually even fainter than the witch head. The witch head is the brightest object in my scene. While you just focused on the witch head which is actually much smarter, that's really what I should have done. So it's really just a strategy thing and I think your strategy worked out better. One thing I really wasn't happy with was the way these yellow stars turned out inside the witch head. And as I'm sure you did too, there was a lot of selective masking and curve stretching of specific areas of the image. And I really pulled up the dust for the witch's head so you could really see it. And unfortunately in that process, I did bring some stars with me and then there was some minimizing afterwards. And yeah, it was quite the process to get it here. And I still feel like it's a little too punchy and contrasty where it's just like, boom, and you see the shape of the witch's head there where I wish there was more of the subtle dust in the area that I'm sure I'm gonna see in your image. Well, it's funny, because I mean we always see someone else's image and we're like, oh, I wish I would have done it like that. Cause to me I saw this and I was like, oh, his has so much more punch than mine and you know exactly where to look. I like the composition better. I like that it's, I like the widescreen cause I went completely different with composition. And so it's just, it's one of those things where it's like, whenever I see someone else's image, I'm like, oh, I wish I would have done it that way, but you know, and the other funny thing is like, we're always our worst critic. And when you, I didn't notice that thing you were telling me about how you brought up the star. You couldn't, you brought up the stars with the nebula. And so then they look a little bit different than the other stars. And I didn't notice that until you pointed it out. And then of course, cause you pointed it out, I can see it now. But it's like, if you hadn't said anything, I probably wouldn't have noticed that. That's right. Yeah, we look at images, you know, from the standpoint of like, I've been looking at this for six hours. So yeah, I've noticed every little thing about it. So yeah, now I really can't wait to see yours and what you've done. Of course, there's that bright star Rigel it is, right? And so there was my focusing point and you can see some artifacts next to it thanks to this, you know, budget lens we're using. But overall, the stars looked a lot better than I thought they would with this lens. And yeah, so there you go. That's why I chose this Target, a reflection nebula, those really cool blues and the dust, all the things that it doesn't require an astromodified sensor. I haven't shot the witch head nebula in I think like nine years. So it was something I wanted to do again and I just thought it would be a great choice for this combo. So and when I said, you know, it's not necessarily the crowd pleaser object. When I showed my wife this for the first time and I said, this is what I shot last night and she's like, that's it. Like that's what you shot. Like she's expecting to see a really beautiful like rosette nebula or something. And I was like, no, hopefully people appreciate how difficult this target actually is. It's a hard, yeah, it's a hard balance because it's like, you know, I'm this exact same way. It's like, if you're trying to please astrophotographers, which head is where you go? Cause it's like, we recognize this is a hard thing. It's like, it's like a dusty reflection nebula. It's so damn that you can't see it in a single exposure or if you can, you could barely see it. I don't know if you could, but like, so even framing it, you're like, the first time I saw it is when I actually put it in a Photoshop and stretch the single exposure. I could not see it on the display screen at all, but I knew it was there because of the star pattern. And speaking of that, this field actually has a very, very useful star pattern configuration around it for reference, not just Rigel, but these other three by the top here and the one right next to it. So they made framing this target actually a lot easier than it could have been. Yeah. And just to go back to Rigel, another thing is like, it's just, it just makes it so much easier if you have a really bright star in your field to focus on. I know we've already talked about this, but Rigel is a very bright star. It's like, in the winter sky, it's like Beetlejuice, Rigel and Sirius, those are the three brightest. And so this is a very bright star. And so you can just put your bottom of mask on. You might be able to even see the pattern in live view. If not, you could take a one second exposure and you'll see it. Absolutely. And I did try to manually dither the images a little bit. So I used the actual, the slow motion controls on the Star Adventure, just shifting the frame ever so slightly between every, say 10 shots or so. I don't know if that made a difference in terms of the noise after stacking, but it was something, a little trick I tried to just help deal with some of that noise as opposed to, and also actually more for avoiding walking noise or something that if I didn't move it over time, that could have created a noise pattern that I wanted to avoid. So I don't know if you did anything like that. I didn't. I was so concerned about messing up my polar alignment like I said earlier that I was just, I wasn't gonna touch the mount. I was only trying to touch just the lens to focus or to check focus, but I didn't want to mess anything with the mount, so I didn't do any manual dithering. That's actually a technique I've never tried. I really should, because I bet it does help. Yeah, I don't think it could hurt unless you do throw off your polar alignment, which makes a lot of sense because you were shooting longer exposures. So yeah, for you to lose five minutes at a time, you really had to just let it, you know, get it right and leave it as long as possible. So yeah, I'm ready to see your image now. And I still don't know what focal length you shot at or how you framed it. So I'm really excited to see it. Oh man. There we go. You did, okay, so Rigel almost near the center with all the surrounding dust. And you even got some of the red hydrogen from a stock camera pulled out of there. Yeah, it's pretty noisy. But that's the tip of Barnard's Loop. So Barnard's Loop extends to Rigel basically and then goes all the way up to almost Betelgeuse. It's this huge hydrogen bubble around the Orion constellation. And so I just think that getting a little bit of Barnard's Loop in there is sort of cool. I cannot, can you believe that we shot the same object? It's insane, yeah. Like there's unlimited amount of targets in the night sky. I mean, to narrow it down to the, you know, the bright stuff, I guess, but still, I just can't believe we shot the same target. So one thing that's interesting to see is that because your Rigel is closer to the center of the frame, that halo is more central, whereas it's hanging off the side in mine, which makes sense, right? Cause it's near the center. So that's cool to see. Yes, and actually that was in my plan mostly just because I was like, okay, I know that the whole witch head is gonna be in at 105 millimeter focal length if I just center Rigel. So then I knew that I could very quickly frame it up too. And I wasn't even thinking about the halo, but you're right, on a lens like this where you're gonna have halos, if you can get the bright star centered and it works with your composition, then you'll have a very centered halo. And I think it does look better. So, and Deep Sky Stacker used to stack, right? Right. Yeah, so I mean, I think that, you know, we limited ourselves to Deep Sky Stacker Photoshop and StarNet if we needed it, but I really don't think that any techniques or using Pixinsight or anything like that could have really done too much more to this data that we collected. I mean, nothing that we, like we could have maybe smoothed things out a little bit more, but I mean, it is what it is. It was, you know, three hours of data of some faint nebulosity shot with a stock DSLR camera uncooled. Yeah, and because we were both going from dark skies, you know, and I didn't have gradient issues either. So I didn't, I really didn't, I didn't do any gradient extraction with this. I just took it out of Deep Sky Stacker, brought it in, balanced the color channels, and then went into processing. The reason that I often like Cyril or Pixinsight is because they have these really nice gradient extraction tools if you're shooting from a light polluted place. But from a dark sky, you really, you could just do DSS and Photoshop and it works just as well. Yeah, I, it was a Borrel Class 4 site that I drove out to for this project as well. And I mean, this, like, I could not attempt this from home in the backyard in the Borrel Class 7 skies. It would just be, I would need at least, you know, quadruple the exposure time to get what I got. And that was just a practicality thing, right? Like, it's not to say that it can't be done in a light polluted area, but we were shooting without filters and with limited time. So I'm pretty impressed with, you know, what both of us were able to achieve with this system in a limited amount of time. And it's really cool to see that we shot the same target, but in a very different way. So cool to see. You've now seen what Trevor and I could do with just a kit lens and a stock DSLR. And like Trevor, I was really pleased with our results. But I want to see what you can do. You can share your photos taken with the kit lens with me by tagging me on Instagram and use the hashtag kit lens challenge. I plan to make more videos using this kit, including the other lens that came with it, which is the 18 to 55. And if you share your photos with me, I may feature them in a future video. Well, till next time, this has been Nico Carver at NebulaFotos.com. Clear skies.