 On Thursday, June 25th, 2020, Helena, from Helena's astrophotography, started photographing a nebula in the constellation Cygnus with her Canon DSLR from Scotland. Later that same night, the Earth rotated and when it got dark on the eastern coast of the United States, I picked up where Helena left off shooting the exact same patch of sky, but I shot HLFA with my ZWO mono camera. In this video, you'll see how we planned, executed, and processed an HA RGB image of the Cygnus wall nebula from two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Hi, this is Nico from nebulaphotos.com. If you're new to my channel, please consider subscribing and checking out some of my other videos for all kinds of tips to get started with deep sky astrophotography. Today, I have a video that I'm very excited about as it's my first collaboration on this channel with another YouTuber. Helena, from Helena's astrophotography, is an excellent up-and-coming astrophotographer from Scotland who reached out to me a couple months ago, and we've been chatting and planning this collaboration ever since. The basic idea was we're going to frame up the same deep sky object that would be good for both of our locations and then hopefully shoot it on the same night if the weather is ever cooperative. If you're not already subscribed to Helena's astrophotography, go ahead and pause this video right now, go over to her channel, the link is in the description, and go subscribe to her. And check out her half of this video collaboration too. Okay, I'm going to cut now to our first conversation where we went over planning the capture of this image. Hi, Nico. Hi, Helena. So this is Nico from nebulaphotos. Helena reached out to me to start this cool collaboration we're going to do in June, and I'll let Helena describe it a little bit. So basically what Nico and I are going to do is we're going to create an HA RGB image of the Cygnus wall in the North American nebula. So Nico is going to be shooting it in HA, am I right in saying that, with your dedicated astronomy camera through your 5 nanometer filter. And I am going to be shooting it with my stop Canon 60D DSLR, and I'm going to be capturing RGB, and then we're going to be going through the editing process as well. Yeah, I think it will look really cool. The great advantage to RGB imaging, of course, is that you get all the star color. So in this world, there's like a really nice blue star and a yellow star, and it really adds something. The drawback to I find a narrow band imaging is you never really get that accurate star color. So HA also is going to make the regular RGB pop a little bit, so it's going to make the image more vibrant, if you like, I think. Yeah, and also more detailed, because one thing is when you're, it will look more detailed at least, because one thing with the HA is because it's only that 5 nanometer pass, you get a lot more contrast. So it really makes the feature sort of pop. Yeah, it's going to be interesting, because I've actually only seen images with 12 nanometer and 6 nanometer, so 5 nanometers going to be really cool, I think. Yeah, my disadvantage here is I'm really just outside of Boston. So another thing that's cool about this collaboration is Helena is in a place with really low light pollution, and I'm in a place with like the worst light pollution imaginable. So it'll be fun to see our results that way too. What portal scale are you, Nico? Portal 9, so the worst possible. Okay, so I'm Portal 4. So my dark site is still Portal 5, Portal 6-ish, about 45 minutes away. I think my dark site's about Portal 1 or 2, and it's about 15 minute drive, it's pretty awesome. Cool. So one thing that we've been talking about is just sort of like the logistics of this. And one of the first things that we were trying to figure out was when would be a good time to shoot it, because we started talking about this in like early May. For both of our locations, it looked like the first sort of opportunity might be the new moon period in June. So I'm going to share my screen here. I think we said it was around the 15th to the 25th of June. Yep, that's right. Awesome. And so this is a program, or a website that I use. It is free, it's like donation supported, called Telescopius.com, and you can like plug in your location. So my location here is Somerville, and then you tell it what object you want to shoot. So the thing that I really like over here, oh, and then I also sort of change the date here to like about when we're going to shoot it. And the thing I like over on the right hand side is at different times you can see how high the object is. So for most places, if your object is getting up to like 55 or 60 degrees, that's going to pass the tree line in most places. So if you're sort of surrounded by trees, once you're getting up to like 60, 70 degrees, it's going to be high enough that you can definitely shoot it. Also, it's really nice for the object to be high in the sky, because that's also usually the darkest part of the sky. So Cygnus is just a really cool area throughout the summer, because there's a lot of nebulae in there. And then I did the same thing for Helena's location here, and you can see it's also getting high there. She's so far north that you can see that this like on mine, it's saying like it gets truly dark in the middle of the night. And on hers, it never gets like true dark, but you can say a little bit more about that. Yeah, so from where I am, so you use telescopius to find like the height of the object and where it would be in response to the objects around you. So I use Stellarium, so I'm more familiar with that piece of software. So I used Stellarium, and basically what I did was I fast forward, I press fast forward on the time for my location. And basically, so I went to around the middle of the 15th through the 25th. So maybe around the 20th, I can't exactly remember, but roughly around then to find where all the objects in the night sky would be. Because obviously now, we're already the 17th of May, Cygnus isn't going to be within reach from where I am, it's not going to be high enough. So I needed to see where that was going to be in response to where I am later on next month. So I typed into Stellarium, got that, and then I used an app that I use called SkyView. And basically I tracked the object in SkyView on my phone, so it's just in, I think it's available on Android and Apple. I have an iPhone and I tracked the object up, so straight ahead, I think I was east in my garden and I tracked it up. And then I could see like where it was in response, because I have actually quite a lot of foliage in my garden, which is quite disappointing really, because I can't get the most of like bottle pour that I have. But I tracked it all the way up on my iPhone and found where it would be around the 20th of June in the new moon phase, and found that I could get it, which was pretty cool. Cool. And so did you get a sense of like what time in the night you would probably shoot it around then? Yeah, so around June really, as you said before, that I never get complete darkness. So right now it gets dark around, say, half nine, 10, and I'm polar aligning by like quarter past half past 10. So in June, it's going to be getting dark around not like a lot different to, not a lot different to that. But it's going to be getting dark, say around half 10, 11, and fully. And then I will start my imaging session. I'll do my polar alignment around quarter to 11, 11. And then I'm hoping the imaging space I'll get is around between half 11 and maybe half one, half two. And then obviously by half two, three, it's starting to get quite light and those long exposures are going to be a real issue. And it's going to like flood out the image with light. So that's the plan so far. What about you, Nico? What's your like imaging time? I'm thinking probably like I could start at 10. But our plan is that like what right as you're finishing your imaging session since you're five hours ahead of me that you can like send me a file. So right now we're talking and it's like noon here and five o'clock your time, right? Yeah, yeah. So I think it will be cool that like if we if the weather works out fingers crossed we can like be imaging on the same night and Helen is going to start. And then she's going to send me one of her raw files so I can plate solve to it. And for people that don't know what plate solving is it just means like you tell your computer exactly the star patterns you want to see in your image. And then it takes a series of pictures until your mouth is perfectly aligned to your reference image. Yep. And then I'll send over the raw files to Nico as we said, and he'll be plate solving and will be on Cygnus wall. Okay. And then on to the editing. So this is going to be like a cool big collaboration. Hopefully everyone's going to really like it on both of our channels. Awesome. I'm so excited for this Nico. Nice to talk to you, Helena. Nice talk to you too. Bye. So the night has finally arrived. Helena let me know over Instagram messages that she has a clear window right now and has started shooting. She also sent me one of her raw frames to plate solve to and in a stroke of luck it's predicted to be clear here in Massachusetts too. So let's take a quick look at what I'll be using to shoot the HLFA frames tonight. For the mount I use the Skywatcher EQ6R Pro. It's a very good Cinta mount that can be controlled with EQ Ascom. For a telescope I use a StellarView SVQ86 which is a quad design meaning that it has no particular back focus requirement and is well corrected. For auto guiding I use a generic 60 millimeter guide scope with the ZWO ASI 290 mini guide camera. And for filters I use Astrodon filters. Tonight I'll be using a 5 nanometer HLFA filter. And for my imaging camera I also use a ZWO in this case the ASI 1600mm cool which is a micro four third sensor and it is a mono camera. Let's take a brief look at the software that I use. This is really just going to be a quick tour. I'm not going to go into detail in this video but I will in future videos. For planetarium I use Cartus CL which is a free program. I use the EQ ModSuite especially EQ Ascom to control my Skywatcher EQ6R. And for guiding I just use the popular PHD2. For image capture I use Sequence Generator Pro. And in this case I already loaded up Helena's picture so using the framing and mosaic wizard and you can see it right there. And so it's the sequence is all ready to go. I can just choose connect all equipment. It connects to everything on my imaging rig. The only thing else that I'm going to do here is just make sure that the gain and everything is set correctly. After that I jump over to the QHY pole master software and do my polar alignment. While I'm doing the polar alignment I have my camera cooling down to negative 15 Celsius. I then jump back to sequence generator pro. I slew and center them out so that we're on the right patch of sky. I then run the autofocusing routine which uses my optech focuser automatically to create what's called a v-curve to find the point of best focus for the HL for filter. With the focusing and alignment all done I can start the sequence and it will start auto guiding and everything else for me. Okay, we can take a look at my first frame here. Sequence generator pro has an auto stretch feature so we can see what it looks like. And I'm now going to go ahead and take as many HL for frames as I can. We're getting a little bit of a late start here because of early cloud so I'm hoping to get about two hours of data tonight. Hi Helena. Hi Niko, how are you? So we've both been able to shoot the signals while on the same night which is amazing because we've all lived in places with plenty of cloudy nights. So it's pretty cool that we got a clear night to shoot it together. Yeah and it was mid-summer for both of us and because of my location where I am the camera sensor was cooking. It was about 28 to 30 degrees but I think I got over that issue in post-processing. And that's the one nice thing about moving to an astro camera is the cooling because like in the summer like I can go here in the northeast United States, negative 15 Celsius all year round including the summer. Yeah and also the benefit of that is you can do your calibration frames first am I right and saying that you can do them anytime because my darks have to be, my calibration frames have to be the same temperature as my lights. But you have control over that so you can just do them whenever it's convenient but I kind of have to do it on the night which also slows down imaging time as well which is really frustrating. So cold seems the way to go when you're in mid-summer really. Yeah the only downside I guess for people that might be watching and are new to this is the cooled astro cameras with the filters and everything that I'm showing in this video in my version of the video is like a lot more expensive and complicated. So when your first thing started I wouldn't really recommend it. Yeah it's too overwhelming because there's something nice about the simplicity of a DSLR even though you're kind of shocked with the amount of noise it can produce. But in winter you've got to remember that it's fine in winter when it's like zero outside so it's perfectly fine then. But we're going to do the best of both worlds, we're going to do the simplicity of the DSLR and the good natural color with the HA for my camera and we're going to combine them now. So how much total integration did you get? So I got just under an hour I think after stacking and removing satellites and before the clouds came in I got about 57 58 minutes so just short of an hour which was really good and now it's raining for the foreseeable future so I'm really happy I went out when I did. And as you said it was really nice that we got out on the same night as well. Yeah definitely and I got about two hours. The only weird thing that happened when I was shooting was I have like a filter wheel and when I tried to rotate it to be the same orientation as your shot, the filter wheel smashed into the guide camera where my guide camera was located. So what I ended up doing was just like unscrewing my astro camera a little bit to get the right rotation but then I noticed like late in the night it just kept like with gravity it just kept rotating a little bit. Oh no. So you'll see in my pictures like it like some of the frames are all matched up and then some are like. I did I did see that when you sent them over I was wondering but that's why that's quite cool. So let's jump into Photoshop why don't you share your screen Helena. Oh so I'll just do that now. So this was and sickness 57 58 minutes and I was pretty happy considering the clouds rolled in and I was quite it was quite nice because I got some natural star color as well and if you've seen any of my previous images my stars are stark white so it was really nice to get that in this image. And my camera sensor was about 28 to 30 degrees so it was cooking and last week so this is what I could do noise reduction wise but I'm pretty happy with it. Yeah, it looks like you're you're guiding and tracking were like spot on because you have really nice round stars here. Yeah I was doing two minute subs because I knew the clouds were going to roll in so I started off with two minutes planning to go to three actually to start over but clouds didn't make that happen. Maybe the two minute subs is is what allowed the star color to be really nice because it is pretty easy to over expose like stars, especially. It's a balance because you want to try to get like, you know, more nebulosity or more structure so. Actually, this was my first first like extended target because I've just done galaxies and a few landscape things so it's pretty cool for me to get like an extended target for the first time. Yeah I mean this the nebulosity in this frame really fills the screen and with a DSLR it can be challenging to tell the difference between the dim nebula and the noise you know because it's 100% I had problems with that. Yeah, yeah definitely. Cool. Okay, so let's go ahead and add in and combine our two pictures. So you go to the file menu and we're going to use place embedded. And then I'll pick your starless image, which Nico sent me previously and we've pre aligned these so it should be okay when I just take it. And if you just turn the little visibility off and on they should look lined up. Yeah, perfect. The wall seems to be tilted just right I think. Good. All right, so then the next thing is go ahead and right click on that starless layer and choose rasterized layer. Here we go. This is quite interesting for me because I've never done something like this before. Yeah it's not too bad in Photoshop. Photoshop is probably my favorite place to do this kind of combination. Yeah, yeah. So then go ahead and drop the starless layer below your RGB layer. Here we go. And for now you can go ahead and turn off the visibility of your DSLR layer. And then we're going to add a saturation adjustment layer. So go to the little things up there and then do the hue slash saturation and click on the button for colorize. Here. Oh, sorry. No, just go ahead and sit. Okay. Yep. And then there's like a colorize with a checkbox in the property. Yep. Click that. And then drag the hue all the way over to the left to turn it red. There we go. And the saturation is sort of a personal thing, but let's keep it not saturated yet. Let's maybe do like 30 or something like that. Yep. Yeah, it really comes down to personal taste when you're doing something like this. When it comes down to coloring, but I don't like oversaturated either. And then let's drop down the lightness just a little bit, but it doesn't get too blown out. So maybe drop it down to like negative 10. Go ahead and turn the DSLR layer back on. And click on it. And with that layer selected where it says normal. Yep. Let's change that to screen. Here we go. Whoa. Okay, so that's our first combination. And with the screen blending mode only, it makes it really makes a really bright image. And so what I usually like to do next is duplicate that DSLR layer. Yep. And... There it is. And that's going to make it even brighter at first, but then... Yep. Change the blend mode of that duplicated layer to soft light. Oh, we're really starting to see something there. Yeah, it's pretty cool, huh? And now go ahead and turn the opacity of both those layers down a bit. This is again, sort of to taste, but I'm going to turn them both down to about 50, 60%. Yep. Cool. That's looking good. All right. And so it's like just a basic edit, I think, or a basic combination. This is really all you have to do to combine DSLR and HA. It's just like what we did was we colorized the HA to red, and then we added the RGB on top and blended it in with these Photoshop's layer blending modes. But it's a little bit bright still, I think. So now we could add a curves layer on top. Yep. Because you want to be careful when you're editing not to blow out the bright points. You can get carried away with wanting to see all that nebula, but then you've really got to consider stars as well. Exactly. Yep. And so with this, we can just sort of do it again to taste, but I'm going to maybe reset my black point a little bit just by sort of dragging in that little point all the way over to the left, down at the bottom corner. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just drag that a little bit to the right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's bringing out, that's more contrast. Yep. The image. It will also hide a little any sort of background noise that's left too. Yeah, yeah. And then you can also with this curves, you know, try a little bit to boost the contrast even more with like a little shallow S-curve or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just put a couple of points in and just sort of move them. Again, when you're doing this, you want to really be careful and concentrate on those stars. Yep. That's looking not too bad. Cool. All right. So now before we crop another, this is sort of a slightly more advanced technique, but we can just talk about it a little bit. I sent you over two images and the other one still has the stars in it, because one thing that happens when you remove the stars from an image is it softens the detail a little bit. So then with that detail back, we can do something called a luminance layer. Yep. So go ahead and go back to the file menu. Yep. And choose that place embedded again. Cool. And then with stars this time. And then with stars. Cool. And that should be positioned correctly, I think. Yes. And you can hit enter. Yep. And go ahead and right click and rasterize that one too. Cool. And then we're going to blend this in with something called the luminosity blend mode. So if we go back for it says normal. And choose luminosity. It's at the very bottom of that menu. Oh, there we go. The one downside to doing this is you can see all those little small stars that you captured are sort of disappearing. And so I don't like to blend in luminosity at full 100%. I usually bring this to something like 20% or 30%, something like that. Yeah, get the best of both worlds, really. Exactly. Yep. And so it just adds this little boost where it like it really makes the details in the nebulae pop a little bit. You still get all those smaller stars, which makes it feel real. Yeah. And the color in the bigger stars is actually coming out much nicer with that opacity down. Yep. And after this, it's really just well cropping, of course, because we have all this stuff along the edges. It's registration artifact. But then after cropping, just like final touches, like boosting saturation or sharpening things or that kind of stuff. So make sure you guys check out both videos because Nico and I are both going to be putting our own spin on the photo, even though it's the same photo and it is going to look very, very similar. We don't want them to be identical and we want to put our own processing skills onto it. So make sure you see both versions on our YouTube and they will probably both be on Instagram. Am I right? Yes, definitely. Yep. Yes, we'll be putting them on Instagram. So make sure to check them there as well, because YouTube has some funky compression rates. And if you want to see the full thing, definitely check out our Instagrams. And I just wanted to thank you, Helena, for suggesting this collaboration. It was really cool and I'm so glad it worked out. Yeah, my pleasure. I've learned so much from doing it. What is this, like a month later, a month and a half since suggesting it? I'm really, really happy to have worked with you on this and hopefully this is one of many more. Okay, I'm picking up where Helena and I left off. I'm just going to do a few more little tweaks to this image, but I'm pretty much happy with how it's looking. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to crop. To crop, I'm just going to choose my crop tool here and drag in a little bit from the sides and then move my mouse slightly outside of the crop box to rotate the image like this. And at this point, I'm just trying to get as much of the image that's usable inside this crop box. So I'm not paying too much attention to composition quite yet. I'm just really just trying to get as much of the usable images possible and then we can crop again later if we do want to change the composition. Okay, that looks good. I'll accept the crop by hitting Enter. And usually after I crop, I like to zoom in and look at the edges to make sure that the edges still look good, that there's no registration artifacts or anything left in the image. They do look good, so I'm going to say that's successful. Okay, the next thing that I want to do with this is just try to make the Cygnus wall pop out a little bit more. And I'm going to do that through a local contrast adjustment that's called High Pass Filtering. And the way that it works is it basically, well, you'll just... The one other thing that I want to do here is make the Cygnus wall part of the image pop out a little bit more, make it a little bit sharper through something called High Pass Filtering, which is basically a local contrast adjustment. And I'm going to apply this to the starless layer down here. And I'm going to apply it twice with different blend modes, just like we did the RGB stars. So I'm going to press Command J or Control J on Windows twice to duplicate that layer twice. And on this... I'll turn all of these off here for a second. On this first starless copy, I'm going to go ahead and go up here to the Filter menu, go down to Other and choose High Pass. So this has been in Photoshop forever. It should be in every version of Photoshop. And you see something like this, like it looks like an inverted image. And the key here is when you move this pixel radius around, you'll see the part of the image that it's applying this extra bit of contrast to. And so if I move it really far over here to the right, you can see that a lot of the image is affected, bigger structures. If I move it way over here to the left, then only the smallest structures are going to be adjusted. So I'm going to try to go somewhere here in the middle. And I will point out that you can apply this more than once to target different structures. For this image, I'm only going to apply it really at this one pixel level. But if you wanted to, you could do multiple passes of High Pass with different pixel radius. Okay, that looks good. I'm going to go ahead and hit OK. I'm going to apply the same thing to the other copy. And just like we did the RGB layers up here, I'm going to apply screen to one of these and soft light to the other. Okay. And then I'm going to turn down the opacity of both. I'm going to turn down the opacity to something like 35, 30%, something like that. And then I'm also going to add a curves adjustment layer and just reset the black point. Okay, then I'll group all three of these, the curves adjustment layer and the two High Pass filter layers just by hitting Command G on Mac or Control G on Windows and call that my High Pass group. Okay, and if I turn the High Pass group off and on, you can see what it did to the starless layer. It really added a lot of local contrast to the image by making a lot of these dark nebulae darker and the bright parts of the image a little bit brighter. It's a little bit different what it's doing than just applying a curve, right? It's doing something a little bit different. And you have to be careful with this. I actually think that what I just did might be a little bit too aggressive. So I'm going to turn the opacity of the entire group down to about 70%. That I like better. Okay, I'm going to turn everything back on and I think that looks pretty good. We might want to add another curves up here just to reset the blacks a little bit and make it sort of the right amount of contrast. Okay, the only other thing that I might do with this image is just a little bit more with color. There are a number of different adjustment layers where you can affect the color. I'm going to just start with just seeing if I add a little bit of saturation if I like that better. And usually what I do is I look away from my monitor, I look back at it, I turn this off and on and see if I like the change. In this case, I like the change but it also had the effect of making just basically the whole image redder. So I don't like that as much. So one thing I might do here is just change the color balance a little bit now and just take the whole image in the cyan red slider towards the cyan. If I turn that off and on, I really like what that did. So basically what was happening was even the blacks were too red before and by just adding a bit of cyan to the midtones, and I might do the same to the shadows actually, it improves the image quite a bit before it felt like there was just basically this blanket of red on it, which is common when you're doing HRGB imaging just to have this feeling like, oh, it's so red. And by adding that color balance as a final step, I think it really improved it quite a bit. Another last step kind of thing you might do is noise reduction, but when I look at this image at 100%, I don't think it needs it. So I'm not going to do any noise reduction and that's usually the case with me. I would much rather just capture more frames than actually apply noise reduction in post because I just don't like how it looks, but it's a personal taste thing. Okay, so that's it. Now all that's left is just any final crops that we want to do. So if I was sharing this to Instagram, I might not want it this wide because wide pictures don't have as much impact on Instagram when you're looking at the vertical feed. So I might choose one of these cropping modes, like I might choose a square or something like that. If I wanted to present it on a monitor, then I might choose something very different, like I might want the 16 by 9 mode so that it really fills the screen. And what I try to do when I do a final crop is I just try to make sure that the eye is lead in a natural way and that there's something interesting to look at in each corner, but then that the corner should sort of lead you to more interesting things in the middle as much as possible. So it's a balance. Sometimes you can't get it quite right with an astro image. But for this image, 16 by 9, I might do something. I'm going to give the nebulae a little bit more headroom here. I'm going to do something like that, basically just a little crop to do the 16 by 9. And I can save that off. I usually use the save for web command. I'll leave it at full quality. Let's just make it a full quality JPEG and save. And let me go ahead and undo that crop and I'll do one for Instagram now. Maybe I often start at square, but then if I can't find a composition that I like with it square like this, then I'll turn it back on to unconstrained and just find the composition that I really like. So for this image, I think I like something like that. You have this really interesting point of the Cygnus wall along that third line close to this focus point. And then you have the dark cloud also at a good point if you're looking at the rule of thirds here. Okay, accept that. And now it's just a tinker. Maybe I just want to add a little bit more saturation and a little bit extra contrast here. Oh yeah, that's actually something I should mention is when thinking about the different platforms that you might deliver the image to, I find that sometimes something looks good on Instagram but doesn't look good if you really blow it up on a monitor. And sometimes Instagram, it helps to add a little bit more contrast than you would normally. But then sometimes I go too far and when I look at it on the phone, it looks much brighter than it does on my monitor. And then I feel that I've gone too far and I have to start over with those contrast adjustments. So it's really a dance, but I like that for Instagram. So let's go ahead and save it. Okay, and that's going to be it for this video. Let me just bring up our final result here, make it full screen. So I think this looks really good. You can see a little bit of blue in some of these bright stars. You can definitely see the nice yellowish orange stars. I'm so good at good star color and it looks well balanced to me. Good natural color, I think. So that's an HA RGB combination. Thanks so much again to Helena from Helena's Astrophotography for suggesting the whole concept here. And if you haven't subscribed to her, go subscribe to her channel. Till next time, this was Nico Carver from NebulaFotos.com. Clear skies.