 One of the best parts of astrophotography is sharing the hobby with other people just as addicted as you are. And one of my favorite people to talk to and collaborate with is Helena from Helena's Astrophotography here on YouTube. We always have a lot of fun chatting and these videos that we make are hard to edit down because we always have really great long conversations that go into all the details, including the art of astrophotography. Helena and I first collaborated on a photo in 2020 when we combined our data on the Cygnus wall. And in this video, you're going to see a behind the scenes look at us collaborating on our latest image together. And so I hope you really enjoy if you're not subscribed to Helena's astrophotography here on YouTube, you should be because I think you'll really enjoy her videos like I do. Hey Helena. Hi Niko, how's it going? Good. We're going to do another challenge object, right? And number two, what have you picked? So last time you picked Cygnus wall, and that was super, super fun. And I thought that I would pick a target that is accessible equally to both of us for a long period of time. So we have enough time to gather our data, obviously due to weather conditions and stuff. So I have chosen the elephant trunk nebula, which I thought was a really, really nice target for both of us. And I've looked up the field of views that we're going to be working with. So my longer focal length than your shorter focal length, and it actually works out really nice. Nice. Yeah. And that's an exciting one since you're new to mono, because it's one of those objects that's like actually sort of hard in color because it's just like it doesn't have like great separation until you add the narrow band channels. And then you really see like, yeah, the elephant trunks sort of like pop out from the blue background. But like that's really hard to get, I think with the color camera. Yeah, mono is completely new to me. So I think because last time you were working with mono, and now I think that we're both working with mono, it's a really good chance for me to learn more about it, seeing as I've literally just started. So it is quite good. And I'm going to be shooting hydrogen alpha. And we were talking about you maybe shooting sulfur. And you were saying, because I assumed that adding sulfur was just going to make it into a Hubble pilot image with, you know, the normal HES-203. But you were saying that sulfur could possibly add in some more detail. And I was really intrigued by that. Yeah, I've been playing around. You know that I have this big mosaic insignias. And that's sort of like, I get so much data for that, but that's sort of like my testing ground for like playing around with different ideas. And I've been playing around with sort of more complex palettes and adding sulfur in to both the red and the blue in different ways, more like a HOO or a natural color palette. Yeah, I think that'll be something that's really nice to show to the people on YouTube, because those watching may not be so familiar with sulfur being able to add detail, especially if they're going from one-shot color imaging. So I think that would be a really nice thing to show if we end up getting sulfur data in the editing process. Yeah, and I'll also get O3. But that's the thing that'll probably make this collaboration maybe stretch out a bit. Because I wait, nowadays I wait till the new moon and I try to travel to a dark site to get O3 because I live right in the city and there's a lot of LED lights here, which are white LEDs. And so they extend into the blue spectrum. And I've just found that with the deep reds like HA and S2, which are at 656 and 672 nanometers, those lights don't really affect those very much because they're not very strong in the deep reds. But they're very strong in the O3 spectrum at 500 nanometers. So I've just been found, even though it's narrow band, I go to a dark site and treat it almost like I would be shooting RGB. And it'll be fun that we're using the same camera. It was funny like I switched to that camera and then you did a couple months later. Yeah, because we've both been reviewing it. And then obviously I did my first light and I kind of fell in love with it. I'm not going to lie. And I think that's partially just because how good the camera is, but also because it was my first time going into monochrome. And I was like, I cannot wait to use this more. So yeah, really glad that we're using the same camera. It's going to be really cool. Hi, Helena. Hi, Niko. How's it going? Good. So for the viewers, it's now October 17th. So we started this collaboration a long time ago in terms of our first conversation. We did. We've not done too badly though. I feel like four months is pretty good. Yeah. I mean, we're both in areas of the world where cloud cover can last for months, it feels like sometimes. It feels like it never ends. Sometimes it's just like, oh, do I move to get a clear sky or do I have to stay here? Yeah, we were talking just about before we hit record that I just got spoiled by going to a star party in Oklahoma. And yeah, it definitely made me think like, I want to move out somewhere like that eventually because it's just like we got four nights of clear skies. It was amazing. So it's always the way it goes. When you travel, it's clear. Then when you come home, it's always cloudy in your life. It's the curse. So we both got our data sets on the elephants trunk. I captured hydrogen alpha and you captured oxygen three and sulfur. Yeah. And I think in the first conversation, we talked about like ratios a little bit. And so we ended up with, I got about four and four and a little bit of each O3 and S2. And you got three of HA, which I think is a pretty good ratio, like because HA is stronger. And so it works out pretty well. And you don't need as much HA obviously because it comes through a lot more than O3 and S2. And we also last time we talked about you were saying how sulfur can sometimes add more detail because the original plan in my head anyway was to combine hydrogen and oxygen to make that really pretty HOO palette, which I think works really nice on nebulae especially. And then I added in the sulfur that you captures as well and picks insight just for fun. And I was like, Oh, let's see what this looks like. And then HOO was out the window. I was like, right, this is so stunning. And I added like such a much larger level of detail than I thought it was going to like I thought I knew it was going to add some detail, but wow, that was stunning. Awesome. Are you ready to reveal yours? Yes. Awesome. So I went Hubble palette and originally I was like, no, I'm not going to be like everyone else. I'm not going to do Hubble palette. But I remember we had a conversation and you said that you felt like it looked the best in Hubble palette. And then I totally agree to be honest. And I really love how like the gold kind of merged into the blue and the gold's obviously goldy brown, orangey. I don't really know what that color is to be honest, is representing the hydrogen and obviously the blues representing the oxygen. And you can see like the dimension and that comes from your sulfur data. Like it was utterly insane. One thing I did as well was I am so I selected I have like an action set in Photoshop and I selected the brighter stars and then I inverted that to then select the smaller stars and I brought the smaller stars back a little bit to kind of push. You can see here that there's a train of these brighter stars that kind of go through the trunk from top to bottom and it kind of catches your eye a little bit. I think it's more when it's actually tilted the other way. But I brought back the smaller stars a little bit, probably even do a little bit more to bring out that train of kind of whitish stars. I thought that was pretty cool. I think that's probably my favorite part of the photo. But yeah, I'm really pleased with how it turned out. And I love your crop. It's like you have the transition to the really blue part like right in the middle, which is something like I was definitely experimenting with a lot too. And then you cut off at the bottom, you cut off like the really dark part so that it's like you feel like you're just sort of like very immersed in the scene. Yeah, I did that so that I don't know the hydrogen, how do I put it, kind of looks like a sea. It's kind of like a sea of dust and then it goes up. So I was really pleased with how that turned out actually. Did you do star net at all on this or is it or just combine and curves and stuff? I didn't actually do star net. I did do star net when I was messing around. I was doing an HOO version, which I wasn't a fan of. But I didn't end up doing star net actually just purely because I felt the only minimizing that I was doing was bringing those small stars back. And when I edited the nib, so how I edited the colors was I used color masks in Pix Insight. And I went into each individual like color channel and I edited them in curves with a color mask. And it wasn't really affecting the stars. It wasn't blowing them out. So I didn't, I didn't see the need for using star net. I could have, I probably should have. But I didn't in this case, something else I did actually, I put this so the way I combined it was through pixel math. And I put all the color channels through pixel math and it came through and it was like really heavily saturated. And it looked amazing. But for me, like I tend to go with more of a pastel look. I haven't really developed a style with mono yet. But I tend to go for kind of those more subtle colors. So I kind of dialed that back with curves and some color masks and ended up with this. So that's the story behind it really. These colors. Oh, thank you. Yeah. They work so well together. They're like the Oh, I've got so many things going through my mind. Like the way the blue drips on to the pink. That's insane. No, I love the colors. I tried to actually go when I did HOO. I tried to go for like a more pinkish tint. You ace that. That is stunning. Thank you. Yeah, it took me, it took me a few tries. I think this is my third one. And I'll show you the first one just to give you an idea of like how just subtle changes can make all the difference. The other thing that I was trying to do with this edit is something I don't do very often, which is colorful stars with narrowband data. I wouldn't give a comment on that. Yeah. And it's not something I do very often because I think that often the colorful stars look out of place or distract from like the beauty of the nebula kind of stuff. But I was just, I was just really trying to push myself with this edit to see if I could make it sort of all fit together. They definitely don't distract in this. Thank you. Like they look so natural. I love the oranges and the yellows coming through the stars. And the definition, and you know how you've got the elephant's tongue and then you've kind of got that middleish pinkish bit with a lot going on. That's how I'm going to describe it. That looks so sharp. Yeah. I like what? So I used, I did a lot of processing on this. Actually more than I typically do, but it just, it just, like I said earlier, it just seemed like the data could handle it. Like going starless, like running, running like Mike's style of sharpening, which is, I think we've talked about before, which is a high pass filter in Photoshop on the starless, then like adding the, like adding a pseudo luminance. So like putting all of the narrowband channels together, but making it a loom and adding that as a luminance layer, sharpening it again, then like taking out all of the stars from what is now like everything combined and then putting these new stars on top and then sharpening it one more time. And it just like, every time I was like, this is not going to work. It's going to fall apart. And then it just like kept going. And I was like, oh, it still looks okay. Okay. Before I show just like a basic HOO, let me show you my first, my first revision here, which is, that was my first revision. And it's, so you still have the pink, but it's just, I just felt like it's not complex. It's still stunning though. Like it's still awesome, but like I really love what we did with the last one. It really separated them out like a lot better and brought the trunk so much more forward. Yeah. So we were talking about what we've been talking about a lot, like how the, the sulfur adds. So let's just look at the channels here for a second. So here's your HA very clean. There's even, neither of us use the stuff down here, but look at, there's even cool stuff like that here in the shadows. I didn't even notice that. I'm going to go back and do a crop and do a second photo. And then here's my O3. And part of the reason it's hard to use that is because in my O3, there's a lot of big stars down here. And so it gets very noisy down there because you get all the halos from the big stars with no nebulosity. And it's sort of, but you can see that. The O3 is still strong though. You can see the difference. You can definitely see a big difference here. Like all of this highlighting on the trunk is in the HA. The outline, yeah. And here you just get the dark and then the O3 background. It's so cool. And then here's the S2. And so you can see that's really different from the HA too. Look at that. Very different, still very poppy. Yeah. I'm not here with the words today, but very different. And like you said, that this thing right here in the thing in the background, look at how much contrast you get in the S2 on that. Oh, that's so cool. See, without the sulfur, that wouldn't look as sharp as it does. All right. So let's put together an HOO just to show here. I'm going to turn this to mode RGB color. I think it's also interesting that you processed mostly in Photoshop and I processed mostly in Pixinsight. I used both, but we processed in different programs and I love that. Okay. There's just your basic HOO. And so then what I would do to this from here is in Photoshop is there's this adjustment called selective color. And with this, you can, this is a lot like what you were talking about with color masking in Pixinsight, where it's just like, I can pick all these different colors and do cool things with them. If you take out a lot of the yellow from the blues and the cyan. Without affecting anything else. You can see, you can really radically change the red just by adding cyan to it or not. So you really have a lot of control over how much things that you want to pop or popping or changing sort of like their tone. Here's like making the reds yellow. It's like, it's really easy to do. So I love this selective color thing, especially when working with, with starless images like this, because then you just don't have to worry about like what's happening with the stars. You can just sort of go crazy with the color. So thank you, Helena, for, for suggesting this collaboration. You know, this is our second one. We did a Cygnus wall one, which you can watch from, it was over a year ago now. And then this one has been great too. Yeah, it's been so amazing and it's been so great to see like the same data from different people with different processing techniques coming together and creating two very different images. And I just think that shows different processing styles. And it's one of the things I love about our show. So yeah, thank you for working with me on it. It's been amazing.