 This video is brought to you by Squarespace. Comets have long, fascinated amateur astronomers. I think the main reason being that they become visible in the sky for just a few weeks or months and then they're gone. The reason for that is they have these really long, strange orbits and when they get into the inner solar system close to the sun, they get really hot and they release all this dust and gas that has been trapped in the ice. Once in a while, we get a very special comet that is visible to the naked eye meaning you can just look up in the sky and see it. The last one like this in the Northern Hemisphere was pretty recently. It was comet Neowise just two years ago in 2020 or three years ago now, I guess. Now there is a new comet for us Northerners. It's called C slash 2022 E3 ZTF. That's its official name. The press has been calling it the green comets because the coma is green. That's common for most comets. And well, I wanna emphasize this is not a great comet because it's really barely visible by naked eye. If you have really good eyesight, you may see a smudge from a dark site but it's definitely bright enough to see in binoculars or through a telescope. And at around magnitude five or six at time of recording it's plenty bright enough to photograph which is what we're hopefully gonna be doing tonight. I have been really eager to photograph it and this is actually the first night in January for my location in New Hampshire that is forecasted to be clear starting around 7 p.m. So we'll see. The nice thing about shooting it now later in January is you don't have to stay up super late like you did earlier in the month. The downside to shooting it now is the moon is getting fuller every night. Tonight it's a first quarter moon and the fuller the moon is, the more it's gonna wash out some of the dimmer details we want like the tails coming off of the comet. But don't let the moon stop you from trying because this is a once in a lifetime event in terms of this comet. And on the flip side, the comet is gonna make its closest pass to Earth on Wednesday, February 1st. And that's usually when it's making its closest pass to Earth when comets will appear brightest in the sky. And a very important thing no matter when you're able to photograph or view the comet is to find a dark location. Tonight, I'm hopefully gonna be shooting it here at home. I'm under a Bordel 3 sky in New Hampshire, which is pretty dark for the East Coast, the East Coast of the US where I live. In terms of gear, I'll always just go back to use what you have. Don't worry too much about having the perfect gear for shooting the comet. Just go try and shoot it. The comet will show up in a telephoto lens if you have like a fast 85 millimeter, 135 millimeter, that's gonna work well. I'm shooting it tonight with this small refractor with a focal length of 300 millimeters. And I'll be tracking and guiding with a mount and a guide scope and all of that. But again, if you don't have all this stuff, you can still capture the comet. You just have to manage your expectations. You may not be able to capture the long eye on tail, but you'll at least be able to capture the bright nucleus and the green coma around it. And you can still do a time lapse to show that little green, dirty snowball of a comet moving faster than the apparent motion of the star. In terms of my gear here, I'm using the ZWO ASI 2600MC camera. I'm gonna be shooting one minute subs at F5 gain 100. If I was using a DSLR and lens, I think I'd probably instead shoot 30 seconds at ISO 1600 F2.8. And these are just starting points because light pollution and other factors might change your specific plan. But in general, you wanna use shortish exposures like under three minutes each because the comet does move fast, especially as it's getting closer to the sun. So if you used and closer to us, I should say. So if you are thinking, I'm gonna do a 10 minute exposure to get all this detail, that detail is gonna be lost because the comet will be moving so fast you'll get motion blur. I don't suggest any kind of filters when shooting comets. So don't use your light pollution or narrow band filters. It's a broadband object. The dust tail is sort of beige. The coma is green as mentioned. The ion tail is usually blue. So we have all these different colors and a light pollution filter or a narrow band filter is gonna interfere with capturing all of these natural colors of the comet. You also don't need any special kind of camera to capture comets. A stock DSLR is fine. It doesn't have to be astro modified. I am using an astro camera rather than a DSLR tonight just because this is one of my lowest noise cameras. And if I only get an hour of data, I wanna make sure I get something good. You can capture comets with either a one shot color camera like this or a DSLR. That's definitely the easier option but it's also possible to use a mono camera. You're just gonna wanna cycle through your red, green and blue filters in a filter wheel. Now in terms of finding the comet, I'm gonna link to this sky live page you're seeing right now in the video description. Tonight for me, for my location in New Hampshire, the comet is almost due north just below Polaris, the North Star. But by the time this video is released on Tuesday, if we go forward in time, that night the comet will be further east and north entering the constellation Camilla Pardales. Now if you have a go-to mount, the easiest thing is just to look up here where the comet will be located in right ascension and declination from your location at the time you're gonna be photographing it. And you can just copy and paste those into your software or write them down and go right to the comet. If you don't have a go-to mount and you're finding it by eye, using a manual star tracker or just a camera on a tripod, you're gonna wanna look for bright stars near the comet. So on Tuesday night, we have HD 51067 right here in the constellation Camilla Pardales. And you can see also if we zoom out that the comet is pretty much right between the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, and the Big W, Cassiopeia. And so you can sort of find it that way roughly too. All right, and then this was just an example for Tuesday night, but let's say it's cloudy on Tuesday and we're shooting Wednesday night. We would just make sure the location is set correctly here and then advance the day to February 1st. And you can see at 7 p.m. The comet is nice and close to this really bright MAG-4 star, HR 2209. And then if we go forward even further to February 5th, we can see it passes right by Capella in Araiga. So it should be really easy to spot that night, but the downside to that night is the moon will be a full moon by then. So it's gonna be more washed out. I'm gonna sort of zoom through the whole capture process a little bit sped up here just because it's very similar to capturing a deep sky object, which I've covered in other videos, but we'll just go through it really quick here. So you're first gonna polar align. I used the QHY pole master electronic polar alignment. Then you're going to focus and I'm using a Bodinov mask here. I have a video about using Bodinov masks. I do mean to update that pretty soon here because there's a lot of different Bodinov masks available, including some new ones for wide angle lenses. But basically the way that a Bodinov mask works is you see this X pattern here and then you're just trying to get that central spike right in between the two other lines so that you are in perfect focus and then you take the mask off. Okay, then I'm going through the plate solving process. I'm using the AM5 mount. And once the plate solving is done, you can see there is the comet. So it did my framing exactly how I wanted it and we are now almost ready to go. There's a quick test exposure. You can see even in that short 20 second test exposure we can see the tails. I'll get guiding going and then we are off to the races with taking pictures. And I'm just gonna let this go. I know that there's probably gonna be some passing clouds at different times. I might check focus occasionally, but pretty much I'm just going to let it take as many pictures as I can before we get completely clouded out here. I love having my own websites. Social media is great, but you have no control over those platforms. They could go away tomorrow and then all of the work you've put into them is gone. Well, if you really want control over your creative portfolio, I really recommend Squarespace is the easiest way to make your own website with your own domain. They do all of the hard lifting for you. So everything is drag and drop. It's what you see is what you get. It's so easy to make changes. It's all mobile friendly and you can very quickly see here your website and desktop or mobile view. Let's say I want to make a change. So for instance, I just moved from Boston to New Hampshire. All I have to do here is click Edit and I can go right in here and just change something. And it's that simple. When I'm done, I just go up here to Done and click Save. I think that they've done a great job with these templates to make them just very easy to use. Another thing that's always bothered me when I make my own websites is the contact form because you always get spam. But with Squarespace, I've never gotten any spam. Every email that's gone through this contact form has been people actually wanting to reach out to me and do something with me or ask questions. So I really think that you can benefit from Squarespace if you want your own website. I've only mentioned the tip of the iceberg here with all the different things that it does. And you can use the link in my description to get started with Squarespace for free. And if you use the code Nebula Photos on checkout, you'll get 10% off your first purchase. Okay, and now we're moving on to processing. In this video, I'm going to show processing the comment images with DeepSky Stacker, which is a free Windows-only program and then finishing in Photoshop. If I feel like it or have time, I might do other parts where I show other software packages. If there's one you particularly wanna see, I guess you could leave a comment letting me know. So anyways, let's go ahead and open up DeepSky Stacker. Again, this is a free program. I'm using the current version, which is 4.2.6. We're gonna start by clicking Open Picture Files. Basically, you can just follow along by going down this list over here on the left-hand side. So I've already gone through this one time already, but so that's why it went right to the folder, but let me just back up here. Okay, there's our folder on the desktop and I'll just click into the lights. This none just means I wasn't using a filter. And then here's all of the different pictures. Instead of just pressing Control-A to select all like I normally would, I'm gonna go from Picture 100 to 160. And I just held down Shift so I could select those 60 pictures, or I guess 61. Oh, and if you didn't catch what I just did, let me redo that. So when they come in, they're not checked because you could go through here and check each picture yourself, but I'm just gonna click Check All for Now because I think these are all good pictures. And when you open up a picture like this just by clicking on it, you'll see that the default behavior might be you don't see the image. We just have to apply an auto stretch here and in Deep Sky Stacker, that's up here in the upper right. So I'm just gonna take this mid slider and move it towards the shadow end of things. And now we should be able to see our image a little bit better. I can see some stars and I can see the comment right there. And now if we go down here to the list and we just press down, arrow, we can check our images. And I'm not gonna go through all that right now because I've already done it, but yeah, you could check each image and make sure it's okay. There's no clouds or anything like that. Okay, and then if you did use calibration frames, you would just load those right now. I did use calibration frames, so I'll go ahead and load those in. But I'll speed this part up. Okay, all my calibration frames are now loaded. And the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna register checked pictures. So if you've checked all of these, they all look good. Go ahead and go down to this red link right here, register checked pictures. And make sure you turn off stack after registering because when we're doing comment processing, we have to register, then we have to use this special comment tool, then we can stack after we've used that tool. But we have to sort of go in that order. So go ahead and click, well, if you want to, you can check your star detection threshold as long as it's finding hundreds of stars, you're fine there. Or I mean, even fewer than 100 is fine too. It just needs to find some stars in order to work. And if it's not finding enough stars, you can lower the threshold. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and click okay. And now it's starting the registration process right away. The reason for that is I already started this earlier and aborted it just to practice for this video, but usually what it would do is it would calibrate first. So nothing to be alarmed about here. It's just, when you have already started something, it can sort of save your process. Okay, so I'm gonna speed this part up too, as it registers all of these images and catch up with you when it's done. Okay, now we're on to the most time-consuming part of this whole process, which is we have to tell Deep Sky Stacker in every light frame where the nucleus of the comet is. I've already unchecked this first frame because it had a low score. So I'm starting here with the second frame and then we're gonna go through every picture. We're gonna use this edit comet mode. And when you position it like this over the comet and click, you should see it create this little pink circle around the comet's nucleus. Then when I click into the next one, it says you've made some changes. Do you wanna save them? And I'll say next time just save without asking. And now we can just go through and do this and it's gonna save each time we click. And we can double-check that just by going back to a previous one and see, yes, it did save that position because the pink circle appears. Okay, and it actually doesn't take that long to do this process. Sometimes you get a weird thing where it doesn't wanna lock onto the comet. So you might just have to skip that frame. But if you do skip a frame where it doesn't seem to wanna lock onto the comet, I would suggest unchecking that so you don't stack it. Okay, I'm gonna speed this process up. When I've checked the comet in each picture, we'll go on to the next step. Okay, so I have now successfully clicked on all of the comet cores here and all the light frames. And so now we can go ahead and stack. We can go over here to stack checked pictures, go into stacking parameters and open up the comet tab. Okay, and if it's your first time ever doing any kind of comet processing, I would definitely recommend this mode, stars plus comet stacking. It does two separate stacks and combines them together for you. So it says the comet and the stars will be sharp. This is what most people want. It does say this process is twice longer. What will happen in these other modes is in standard stacking, you would just get a picture where it registers, it stacks using all of the star positions that you've already registered. But the comet, since it's moving through the star field, it would be completely sort of blurry or they say fuzzy. In comet stacking mode, it would use the position of the comet but ignore the positions of the stars so all the stars would be trailed. And in this one, it does both standard stacking and comet stacking and then just combines the two pictures together for you. So you don't have to worry about doing it. So I definitely recommend doing this one and just hit okay here. And we've already done all the kind of calibration and debayering and registering so all we're gonna be doing is stacking. So I'm gonna go ahead and click okay. Okay, it's done stacking. It didn't take too long. Maybe for the 60 frames, it took 20 minutes or something. I'm just doing this on a Lenovo laptop. And then we're gonna go ahead and save this. So don't worry about how it looks. We're gonna stretch it in Photoshop. So over here in processing, just click save picture to file. Make sure it's saving as type TIFF image, 16 bits per channel, compression none, embed adjustments, but do not apply them. So make sure your settings look like mine here. I'll just save it back to my comet ZTF folder. And we'll call this stacked. Okay, so I've opened that stacked.tiff file that we saved that of Deep Sky Stacker in Adobe Photoshop. I am on a Mac now, just because I happen to have Photoshop installed on my Mac and not on my PC, but everything should be the same no matter which operating system you're using. The only thing that would change are keyboard shortcuts and I'll try to save both. Okay, and I am just going to duplicate this layer. I'll call it first stretch. If you wanted to use a keyboard shortcut, you can do command J on Mac or control J on Windows to do the same thing. I always like to just keep this unstretched version just in case I need it for something. Okay, and then we can go to image adjustments levels or use the keyboard shortcut command L on Mac or control L on Windows. And we can start stretching the image just by taking this mid-tone slider and dragging it to the left. Now, if you see something funky like this when you're stretching, don't worry because after you click okay, that funciness should go away. That's just a display issue when you're dealing with complex data like this. I don't think it's an actual issue with the data. So I'm gonna press command L again. And now we see something interesting. You see how there's this little spike right there and then this big spike right there. What's going on there is we have these corners that for some reason did not get cropped off in the registration process. So it's showing up as data that should be clipped to black. So we don't have to worry about that when we're doing this stretching. We can take the shadow slider and bring it right over to the edge of this larger spike here and not worry about these little corners. And you can see again, I think that looks a little funky, but once I hit okay, it looks okay again. At this point, I can really see those corners and see where I would wanna crop. So I'm just gonna go ahead and crop those corners out so we don't have to deal with them anymore just cause they're gonna throw off our histogram representation and it's easier for me to understand everything without that distraction. So I'm just gonna crop those out like this. Press enter to accept the crop and now that looks a lot better. Okay, let's keep stretching just a little bit more. I'm gonna take this down and now you can see something interesting. You see how there's this little gap right there in the histogram. And if I look at the actual image, this sky looks way too blue. So we need to do some color balancing and the best way to do that is to be able to see your color channels. And yes, indeed I can see the blue is way ahead of the red and then the green is falling behind here. So they're all separated. If you don't have this view, you can just click on this little hamburger menu right here and change it from compact view to all channels view and you should be able to see the three histograms. Okay, so now I'm gonna open up levels one more time and this time I'm gonna be looking over here as I change each channel separately. So see right here in levels you can change it from RGB mode to single channel mode. And so I'm gonna go to the blue channel and I'm gonna take this shadow slider and I'm gonna move it over until the left edge matches up with the left edge of that green channel. Then I'm gonna do the same thing with the red channel like that. And you can see now the image looks a lot better. This sky looks a lot more neutral. Okay, cool. So you can see the dust tail I guess is just this sort of general thing right here. This is called the coma, this green part. This little bright part is called the nucleus. And then this long one that goes all the way down here is the ion tail. And it's not looking super blue in my image but that's okay. The moonlight probably affected the blue color. I'm happy that... Well, I sort of framed it this way on purpose but to get this little asterism right here sort of with the tail is what I was going for. So I'm glad that worked out. Okay, one thing I notice here is that there is a gradient, right? So over here it's darker in the sky and over here it's brighter. So I'm just going to take a curves adjustment and I'm going to do this where now over here this is about where I want it to be. Over here it's way too dark but we're going to then apply a gradient to the mask on this curves just by grabbing the gradient tool and doing something like that. Nope, wrong way, this way. I don't know, I was seeing some banding there so I just played around with the curve a little bit until that banding disappeared and I think this looks a lot more even now and if we might just stop right here we could just apply a little bit of a saturation boost or something and then stop right there. I'm going to go a little bit further though because I like to push the images a little bit see what I can bring out. And so the way I'm going to, one way I'm going to go further is I'm going to make a starless version of this with star net plus plus. So to do that we're going to save a copy and we want to save TIFF with no layers. I'm going to call this stars.tif. I'm going to save it in my star net folder. Since I want to make a starless version I'm going to run star net which is a little complicated on Mac. It's a command line thing so you have to go to the terminal and I put my program in the documents folder so I'm going to type in CD space documents and then CD space star net and then I'm just going to press tab to complete that. Okay, now I'm in the folder and there is a command within that folder called run star net.sh that's a shell file so I'm just going to do period slash run underscore star net.sh and it takes that file that we gave it stars.tif and it makes a starless version and it takes a little while to do this and that worked quite well. Let's try a curve so I'm going to just do command M on Mac would be control M on Windows and I'm just going to really aggressively stretch this just because I want to see what's there. Put this to the side for a second. Okay, so you can see the eye on tail does extend all the way down there but it's pretty noisy when we zoom in like this. There's some interesting structure over here. I don't know if that's real or not. Okay, in any case, let's try to just bring out as much of that stuff as we can. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. Okay, so now I want to bring this image back into this one so I'm going to do command A would be control A on Windows to select it command C, control C on Windows and then command V to paste or control V on Windows. It pasted on top here and now that's all we see but we want to blend it in so I'm going to do a screen blend and that really helped with the tail. The nucleus is getting a little hot, a little bright but and then the background we're seeing a lot more noise and it's a little bit more uneven and we also have a little bit more of a blue tint now so yeah, if we look at the channels they're sort of wonky again. So let's do a stamp from visible. It's command option shift E on Mac or control alt shift E on Windows and let's just correct that blue a little bit. There we go. And then I'm also going to just darken the whole thing a little bit. Okay, it's looking pretty good. There's a weird sort of brighter part of the background right there. It's sort of bothering me. I think I'm just going to make sort of a funky mask here. Okay. And I'm going to after I've made that selection I'm just going to select curves adjustment layer and darken those parts of the image up a little bit. Okay. And that looks obviously really bad but what I can do is then click on this mask and I'm going to feather and density out that selection until it looks better. Okay, that looks pretty good but now I'm just going to do another curves adjustment just an overall, I think what I want to do next is the saturation I think looks perfect in the actual comet part but the stars could use a little bit more saturation. So I'm going to do a stamp from visible again command option shift E on Mac or control option shift E on Windows and then I'm going to do select color range and select the highlights and we'll just go pretty aggressive with this. So I want to get all the stars. So I'm doing 100% fuzziness range of 89. Let's see what that looks like. I'm going to press the Q key for quick mask and I'm just going to paint out the comet nucleus here in black because we actually, I was fine with the saturation of that so I don't want to include it in this star mask. Okay, good enough. So now I have all the stars selected. I'm going to go over to the adjustments layer, pick saturation and increase the saturation of the stars sort of a subtle thing but I can definitely see a big difference. Okay, you know what? I think I'm pretty happy with this. We can just do a final crop I guess. Let's do a 16 by nine. I think that might look good. Going a little bit tighter on the comet and I want to keep this asterism definitely. Okay, I'm going to do one more stamp from visible and just do a final little pass with a camera raw filter here. Camera raw filter. I'm just going to play around a little bit with a curve in here and add a little bit of the color noise reduction or actually maybe plenty of color noise reduction. Let's zoom into a hundred percent. See what that's doing. Yeah, I like that. Let's see if we can add a little bit of noise reduction and a little bit of sharpening too. Yeah, that's looking good. Sort of look all over and make sure there's nothing standing out as being bad. So I like that the tail, you can just very faintly see it extend all the way to the edge. This cluster is my favorite thing. Okay. Yes, this is all looking okay. So I'm going to zoom back out. All right, and I think I'm going to call that it. So let's bring it full screen. Take a look. You know, there's little things we could still change, but overall I'm pretty happy with that under a quarter moon. Hey, editor Nico here. When I was editing this video, I thought this final version looked a little bit dark on some screens. So I decided to make a brighter version. And even though it's a little bit noisier, I think I prefer it. So just wanted to show you this to you. All I did was just another couple curves adjustments to sort of make everything brighter and I think I like it better. So you're now seeing the names of everyone who supports this YouTube channel over on Patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. It's an excellent community of dedicated amateur astrophotographers, just people who want to learn and are very willing to share their own expertise. We have over 800 members now. There's an active discord that you can get involved in. And I can't thank my Patreon members enough because I'm now doing this full time thanks to all of you. And it is what has allowed me to make these videos and to really pursue this as my own business. So thank you so much to all my current Patreon members. And if you enjoy this channel, I think you will get a lot of benefit out of joining my Patreon community. It starts at just $1 a month. And for that, you get a bunch of perks including direct messaging support with me, a monthly Zoom chat with the whole community, a monthly imaging challenge organized on Discord where we pick different targets every month. And a whole lot more. So if you're interested, head over to patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.