 We're just about 10 days out from my favorite holiday, Halloween. So that means it's time to start thinking about pumpkin carving. And in this video, I'll show all of you space enthusiasts out there, how to transform your favorite photos of space into really cool pumpkin carvings. The first thing I'll go over is all the supplies and tools that I'm going to use. So we obviously need one large pumpkin for each design that you want to do. You'll want a serrated knife for cutting off the top. I'm using a big bread knife, a metal spoon for scraping out the insides, some kind of various smaller blades for carving. I got these ones at a craft store and I also use power tools in my carving. If I only had to pick one power tool, I'd pick my Dremel as my favorite for pumpkin carving. But for stars, I also really like having a drill with various size drill bits. And then last but not least, you'll need some reference photos. And I'm using my own astrophotography that I've personally shot, the Lunar Eclipse and a photo of the Pleiades Star Cluster. Both were taken with regular Canon DSLRs attached to refractor telescopes. And you'll want a printer to make templates of these photos for carving. A black and white printer is perfectly fine. And lastly, some saral blue transfer paper and a pencil or pen for actually transferring your design to the pumpkin. And that's it for supplies. So next we'll jump onto the computer and turn our photos into high contrast black and white templates for carving. Okay, for these steps on the computer, I'm going to be using Photoshop, but you could also be using GIMP or Affinity or some other program where you can manipulate images. We're not doing anything super complex here. So I'm going to click Create New and I'm going to use the print setting of 8.5 by 11 because that's what I'm going to be printing on. I'm going to choose Landscape Orientation and the rest of this we can leave alone and click Create. And then I'm just going to do File, Place Embedded and pick one of my pictures here. I'll start with the Lunar Eclipse picture and click Place. And I want the feature of this picture to be, of course, the moon. So I'm going to have that fill up more of this piece of paper. So I'm going to grab my corner here and stretch this out. All right, good. So next step is we want to invert this and turn it black and white. So what is black will become white. What is white will become black and so forth. So I'm just going to go up here to Adjustments. I'm going to pick Invert and then I'm going to go back to Adjustments and choose black and white. Great. Okay, and then we're almost done, actually. The last step is we just want to make this higher contrast. Usually that's almost always a given that you need your picture to be higher contrast to make it into a template for carving so that we can really see these craters and so forth. You can just use this first one right here, Brightness and Contrast, and we can try just upping the contrast that way. We can also open up a curve adjustment and try it this way, too. All right, I said that was the last thing, but I'm actually going to do one more thing. I'm going to do a Unsharp Mask on this original picture here just to make the edges of everything stand out a little bit better. So I'll go to Filter, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask. I'm just going to go crazy with these. Yeah, just so we can really see these edges. Okay, and that's it. I'm going to print this off twice, and the reason for printing it off twice is, one, I'm going to transfer to the actual pumpkin, and that copy is going to get sort of ruined through the transfer process, but then I want another just to look at as I'm carving. So we'll just go to Print and print off two copies. And then we're going to do basically the exact same thing with the other picture. If you're doing two pumpkins, I'll just show this just in case I do anything differently with a nebula picture. I know there's one thing I'm going to do differently actually, which is I'm going to add star spikes because I think that's going to look cool for the pumpkin. So we're just going to stretch this out so that it fills the piece of paper. Okay, I'm going to turn it, or I'm going to invert it, right? And then I'm going to turn it black and white. So I'm going to click on this original image. I'm going to go up to Filter, and I have this paid plugin already installed. It's called Star Spikes. This is exactly what it does. It takes an image that doesn't have star spikes and adds them. You can see just the default here, or I don't know, these might be the last settings I tried. Look pretty good, but we can play around with this. To me, these spikes look about the right intensity. Like I want them nice and intense, but I don't want them quite this long. So I'm going to do littler, yeah, like that. And you can see by changing the quantity, you can get a lot more spikes. I'm going to keep it like that and click OK. And there we go. So now we have some star spikes on our image. Again, I'm going to increase the contrast a little bit. Okay, that looks good. So this is our Pleiades template. We can go ahead and print off two copies of that. With our templates printed out, we're now ready to transfer them to the pumpkins using the transfer paper. And I use this Saral brand blue transfer paper. So you can just cut out a piece of the transfer paper. You want it slightly bigger than your template and tape it blue side down or color side down to the pumpkin and then tape your template on top of that. I'm just using painter's tape because that's what I had around, painting tape would work just as well. And then I'm going to use a fairly blunt colored pencil here, but you could also use like a ballpoint pen and draw on the template where it's black or gray. Now, this is a fairly complex design, probably too complex for a beginner at pumpkin carving and I don't even know how well this is going to turn out for me. So I know that I'm not going to be able to get all of the detail of the Lunar Eclipse into my carving. So I'm picking my battles here and mostly just drawing in where there's the most contrast or where there's a prominent edge that I can see. Okay, I finished that. So I can now remove the tape and the pieces of paper and that's what it looks like with the design transferred to the pumpkin. I'm going to do the same process for the other one and I should point out that I now do this transfer part first. I've been carving pumpkins like this for many years and I've tried cutting off the top first or transferring the design first just to see which is going to be a slightly cleaner process and for me, I find that transferring the design first and then doing the rest works better. But you do have to be careful not to smudge the blue chalk or whatever this is because it smudges fairly easily. So the next step is as I alluded to is we're going to cut off the tops of the pumpkins now with the big serrated knife. And when doing this, you always want to make sure to be very safe because this is probably the most dangerous part of pumpkin carving is cutting off the top like this. Have the sharp side of the blade facing away from you. Don't put your fingers in the path of the blade at all. Just be very extra aware of that when you're carving off the top of the pumpkin. And I do two extra things here one is I make a little notch outwards so that it's very obvious how the top goes back onto the pumpkin so you're not just sort of like turning it around trying to figure it out. And then if I plan to use real candles inside the pumpkin which I don't always do but if I do plan to use real pumpkins then I cut out little extra holes in the top so that the candles have plenty of oxygen to keep burning because with some of these designs where you don't have major cutouts in the front you can actually extinguish the candles if they don't get enough oxygen. Okay, so once you have the top off you've made my little extra notches if you want you're going to use the metal spoon and your hands to take out all the seeds and guts or membranes and I would highly recommend saving the seeds because I'll show you at the end of the video my personal favorite thing about this whole process is making a very tasty snack out of the seeds. So once you have all the seeds and guts removed I'd recommend scraping the inside opposite where you will carve the design or I mean on the same pumpkin wall where you'll carve the design. Now don't go crazy yet with scraping I usually try to reduce the wall thickness by about half so if you can think of the wall thickness of your pumpkin as being one inch then I bring it down to half an inch but not much further than that because if you scrape too aggressively at this point then it becomes harder to do the carving because the pumpkin wall becomes too weak when you're doing the carving and it will sort of fall apart but the reason that we scrape with a complex design like this is to allow light to shine through even when we don't make a full cut all the way through the pumpkin wall a lot of times we just take off the pumpkin skin and let the light pass through the pumpkin flesh and that's going to work and the effect is going to work much better if the pumpkin flesh itself is thinner by scraping on the inside Okay now we are ready to actually start carving the outside of the pumpkin and I use a small U shaped or V shaped blade or a combination and I go for edges of my design so I'm going to start up here at this top edge and in this part I'm actually going to cut through all the way so I can actually just keep scraping with this little blade through the pumpkin wall and the reason I'm going to go through all the way here is because this is the brightest part of the eclipsed moon so I want it to really shine Okay now that I've done all of the carving I want to do with the little manual blades I'm going to use my drill electric drill to drill the stars that's my favorite part of the lunar eclipse I love looking visually through binoculars and seeing the stars right next to the eclipsed moon because usually the full moon is so bright that if you look through a telescope or binoculars you can't see any stars around it but during the lunar eclipse it gets dim enough that you can see all those stars and it's really pretty cool to see Okay and then the last step in carving is I'm going to use this Dremel tool to take off the skin in many places and add other little details with the Dremel tool and for this I'm looking at my reference template and I'm going to actually go ahead turn off the overhead light here and put a light inside the pumpkin and work on it that way that's a cool tip if you've never done that before you can actually sort of get an idea of what the carving is going to look like as you're making it If you don't have a Dremel you can do all of this with just normal little manual blades like I was using earlier it just takes a lot longer because you're scraping off a lot of pumpkin skin so the Dremel is just good for doing that kind of work Okay that's it for the Lunar Eclipse carving let's now move on to the Pleiades with the White Pumpkin which has turned out to be a bit more of a challenge I started by carving in the star spikes with the blade I then drilled out the stars with three different sizes of drill bits to get a different variety of star brightnesses in there and then I used the Dremel to start adding the reflection nebula but when I got to the step where I lit up the inside of the pumpkin I was using a blue light I found that the yellow flesh of the pumpkin underneath the white skin made the nebulosity green when I was going for more of a blue reflection nebula so I should have thought of this ahead of time and gone for one of my more narrow band pictures in false color where that green can come through but because I was already committed to the Pleiades and green just didn't feel right I decided to paint in the nebula with some acrylic paint that I found around the house and my kitten Nunky named after the star in Sagittarius was very interested in this part of the process as you can see using the blue paint on the outside of the pumpkin it doesn't really quite work I sort of knew this but it means to get the full effect I now need a light source both inside the pumpkin and outside the pumpkin so here's what that looks like I do like this final result but it was not exactly how I imagined it all working and now here's that comparison with the reference photo and the eclipse now pumpkin carving day is not quite over for me because once I'm done with the pumpkins we actually get to my favorite part which is roasting and eating the pumpkin seeds so here's my process for doing that we can call these Nikos cosmic pumpkin seeds we'll start by rinsing them off and patting them dry with a paper towel then spread the cleaned seeds out on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and make these seeds just with nothing on them at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes while the plain seeds are roasting we want to assemble the flavoring for the seeds in a large bowl and how you flavor them is really up to your own taste I like things a little bit extreme so I'm going to do a pretty complex mix here of tastes I'm going to do a mix of cumin and cinnamon and also add a few shakes of cayenne pepper which will add some heat I'm going to do salt of course and then I'm going to do some maple syrup to give this mix both some sweetness but also a fall vibe that I think will pair really well with the cinnamon and then finally some oil and the oil works as a binder to get the spices to coat the seeds fairly evenly so we mix all of that up and then after the seeds have roasted for 20 minutes mix the seeds with the flavoring and put them right back on the baking sheet roast for another 15 to 20 minutes when they're done they should look something like this and if you let them cool for a couple minutes they should have a pretty nice crunch for me these are super addictive I'll finish off this whole bowl in a day probably so I know this video is a little bit different I will be getting back to observatory updates and hopefully ask for photography if the sky is ever clear here in New Hampshire but till next time this has been Nico Carver thanks for watching and clear skies