 Hey, my name is Nico, and I'm a bit of a Nebula junkie. As soon as I get a new telescope, I immediately want to look at Nebulae with it. Nebulae are these colorful clouds of gas and dust out there in our Milky Way Galaxy that, for me, they're the most beautiful of all the astronomical objects. And my absolute favorite Nebula to look at visually with an eyepiece like this and a nice telescope is the Orion Nebula. When you look at the Orion Nebula visually from a dark sky, it looks like this majestic bird made out of smoke. But the bird's body is sort of this greenish teal color. And if your eyesight is really good, you may also see some red around the wings, almost like they're on fire. And then the last really cool thing with the Orion Nebula is this grouping of four bright stars right in the center of the bright core of the Nebula. These stars are called the trapezium cluster, and they're fairly easy to split. When we say split in visual astronomy, we just mean being able to clearly see all four stars and the separation between them. So after looking at the Orion Nebula, maybe you want a way to remember what you saw at the eyepiece. And you could sketch what you see, like with paper and pen or paper and pencil. But maybe you don't really feel like you have the skills for that. You don't really want to learn how to draw. So maybe you want to photograph it instead. And this is where we run into problems, especially with this type of telescope. This is a Newtonian reflector on a dobsonian mount. It's an excellent telescope for visual astronomy. But it's definitely not designed with photography in mind. Typically with astrophotography it'd be much better to start with something smaller on a motorized tracking mount that is designed to work with cameras, including DSLR cameras. This Newtonian instead is designed both in how they place the mirrors and how the focuser is set up to work with eyepieces. And a DSLR actually won't even reach focus with this telescope unless you modified the placement of the mirror or added a barlow lens. Which works okay for lunar and planetary imaging because those kinds of objects, planets, and the moon are very bright in the sky. But for deep sky the objects are really dim so we don't want to use a barlow lens. So if we want to photograph a nebula with a telescope that's more set up for visual use like this one, I think the best way to do that is with a smartphone at the eyepiece. And you need to keep your expectations in check with this method. You can get some very nice zoomed in views, but this is called a focal photography, meaning we're taking a picture of the image already brought to focus by the eyepiece, and it's almost like macro photography of that eyepiece image. This is different from prime focus photography where the telescope actually replaces the camera lens, replaces this, and you focus the light right onto the image sensor. And prime focus photography will always give you a sharper, more detailed image. But as I said, this telescope isn't designed for that. So a focal photography where we go through the eyepiece is going to be our best bet, and I think the best kind of camera system to use for that is your smartphone. And technically, you could hold your phone up to the eyepiece at the exact right angle for long enough to get a picture, but it's very difficult. I've tried it many times. Usually the picture comes out blurry because it's just hard to keep it right there at the right angle for long enough. So what I recommend instead is a smartphone telescope adapter. And there are many different models of these available at many different price points. I might do a more full review style video of all these ones that I have at some point. But for this video, let me tell you about this one. This one is from the company called Turing, and they sent me this recently to take a look at, and they just told me that they're doing a pre-order campaign on their website right now. So if you're interested in this, it's a good time to order this. This adapter is for newer iPhones that have the MagSafe magnet. So instead of having to clamp your phone to this adapter, instead your iPhone just sticks to it like that with the magnets built into your iPhone. And that is what I find most exciting about this design. With most of the universal smartphone adapters, there's going to be part of the screen that gets obstructed by the clamp holding the phone. And I've had situations where that clamp actually gets in the way of the app UI that you're using. With this one, as you can see, the whole screen is unobstructed. And other than that, this one just feels a lot more premium than any other phone adapter I've used. It's metal where it should be, everything's nice and smooth, and it's much less bulky than some of the other high-end adapters that I've tried. So I'm not getting paid to promote this. I just think it's cool. And if you want to pre-order it, they did set me up with a discount code for viewers of this channel. So if you're an iPhone user and you want to pre-order this adapter, you can get an additional 10% off the pre-order price. So it's a 20% off total discount if you use the code Nebula20 anytime over the next 30 days. And the link for ordering this is in the description. So the next part of this process is clamping the adapter onto the eyepiece and getting the phone's camera lens positioned correctly so that it's hitting right on the center of the eyepiece and you get a good photo. And you can do this during the day, and that makes everything a lot easier because everything's bright. You can also do it at night. It's a little bit harder. So my workaround at night is I shine my red flashlight right down the tube, and that makes it much easier just to line up that bright red circle in view on the camera and then tighten everything down. And then I know I have the smartphone camera centered, and we can go on to the next thing, which is focusing. And for focusing, you can just look at the stars. Instead of like looking at the eyepiece, you're going to be looking at the camera screen, but then it's just the same. You just move the focus knob on your telescope back and forth until the stars are as small as possible. Sometimes it helps to use a bright star or a planet or something like that. It's even clearer. After we focus, we need to find the Orion Nebula. I'm going to use this finder scope right here. That lets me see a wider field of view and it has a crosshairs that helps with centering. So all I have to do is center the Orion Nebula in the finder scope, and then it's going to show up in the main telescope. And the reason this works is I've already aligned the smaller finder scope with the main telescope. They're centered on the same spot in the sky. You can do this alignment process during the day with like a treetop, or I find it's always pretty easy to align with a bright object in the night sky like Jupiter, because you can just scan with your main telescope until it's centered in the eyepiece, and then align with your finder scope. Once they're aligned, the finder scope and the main telescope, then you can use your finder scope to find Orion Nebula, which is in the sword, just below and to the left of Orion's belt. Once it's centered and focused, you can start taking pictures of the Orion Nebula with any camera app on your phone. For iPhone, I do recommend this app really designed for this kind of thing called Nightcap Camera App. It costs $2.99, and it gives more control over things like the exposure length, the ISO, and so forth, just by dragging your finger over the screen. It also does a bunch of other things like star trails photos that I've covered in another video, and Nightcap does let you save in TIF format, which is nice, but I haven't found it really makes a huge difference for something like this. So if you only have the JPEG option with your smartphone, it's no problem at all. And I'm just taking a variety of shots here, some a little brighter with slightly more trailed stars, longer exposure, and some a little dimmer with shorter exposures, and that gives us a better view of the trapezium and that trapezium cluster. Okay, and I think a lot of people would be happy with just these snapshots. They're really cool. You can see the colors in the Nebula. I especially like these slightly darker ones that show the details in that core, that trapezium region a little better. But next, what I'm going to show you is if you want to, you can take these photos into Photoshop and stack them together and edit them a little bit to get a combined photo like this one that has both the core details of these shots, but also some of the color and extended nebulosity of these ones. And of course this editing is completely optional. If you don't like editing your photos, don't feel like you have to do this. I'm just showing it for people that are interested in editing what they get with their smartphone. Okay, here we are in Photoshop, and for anyone that doesn't know Photoshop, it's now a subscription software. So you do have to pay $10 a month to get it. It's made by Adobe. It's a classic in photo editing. It's one that I'm very used to. So that's why I'm using it here. But there's many other alternatives. There's a affinity photo that's very similar. And if you're just doing basic edits, you can even just edit on your smartphone. Like for instance, if all you wanted to do was just bring out the colors a little bit more, that would be called a saturation adjustment. And you can just use something like Snapseed to do this same thing of just taking a saturation slider and increasing the saturation. And then you can see the green and the red and blue and other colors in there better. Now, if I want to increase the saturation and also make the picture brighter, you'll see that there's a problem. We only have one second of exposure here. And so when you edit the picture, when you try to make it brighter and more saturated, there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of color noise all over the image. And this is completely normal with just a single one second picture of something this dim for there to be a lot of noise. And you can try to do noise reduction. But it's not going to work that well when you just have one picture like this. It's going to smooth out some of this noise. But then it'll actually make some of the noise look just like the nebula, right? That's not really what we want. We don't want to like trick our eyes into thinking these blotchy noise patterns are actually the nebula when they're not. So I don't really think doing much noise reduction on this single photo is going to really work out too well. So instead, what I usually do in astrophotography processing is I stack photos together. Now with this kind of thing, iPhone astrophotography stacking is a little bit more challenging because the stars, if we really look at them, are not super round because this is a one second picture. So there's going to be some star trailing. And so typical astro stacking programs will really struggle with this and probably won't align it automatically. So I'm going to show you how to align a bunch of pictures you've taken with this method manually in Photoshop. So we're going to appear to the file menu and go down to scripts and choose load files into stack. And then you'll just click browse and find your files. And so here are my files of the Ryan nebula. And you can pick, you know, all of them or maybe just the ones that you think turned out the best. I'm just going to pick a few of the ones that I think turned out best here. And you can see I have a mix of JPEG and TIFF here. That's because I was just trying different things out, but I also wanted to show they don't have to all be a particular format. They don't have to be taken in TIFF. If you have all JPEGs, that works fine too. Now you can try this attempt to automatically align source images. I've already tried it. And with my images, it didn't work. So I'm not going to turn that on again. But if you want to, you can try it because if it does work great, then you're saving a lot of time. I will also not turn on this create smart object after loading layers. We are eventually going to turn our stack into a smart object, but we have to first manually align them. So I'll leave that off too. So I'll click OK. And over here, it makes a new Photoshop document with all of our different pictures of Orion nebula down here in the layers menu. And let me just actually go ahead and make this layers bigger so you can see them. So see, here's all the different pictures over here on the right of Orion nebula. The only one we're seeing here in the middle is the one on top. But if I turn the visibility of that one off, then we see the one below. And again, the one below if I just keep turning these eyeball icons off and on, right? So whichever one is on top is the one we're seeing. But there's another cool feature with this layers panel, which is the opacity feature. So if I have this layer selected, the layer on top, and I turn down the opacity from 100 to, let's say 60. Now you can see some of the layer below while you're still seeing some of this layer because I've made it 40% transparent. Okay, so now you sort of get the layers panel and how this works. We want to start aligning them up and we want to start at the bottom of the layers panel. So just go ahead and take this scroll bar over here, go all the way to the bottom. And I just want to start with this one on the bottom. So I'm going to turn the visibility of all of these off, except for the one on the bottom. There's a keyboard shortcut for that, which is alt click. So if you do field on the alt key on your keyboard and click on this last eyeball, it will turn off the visibility of all of the ones, except for the one you clicked, alt click. And then I'll turn on the one right above it. Okay, so you can see those are pretty close, but not quite aligned. When I turn on this one above it, I'm going to then turn down the opacity of this one that's right above the bottom layer. Okay, and that lets me see down to this one, which helps me align them. And to align them, I just want to make sure that I have the move tool selected. It's this top tool over here in the toolbar on the left. And I can just grab the layer here on this canvas, make sure this is selected, and move it around. And you can see just by moving it like this, I can get pretty close. But to make sure we're really lining them up, what I recommend is you zoom in on Mac, this would be command plus on Windows, it's control plus. And then you can really see the stars. And we can really line them up that way. And you might find you have enough control just to do this with your mouse, just dragging a layer. Or you might find that it helps to use your keyboard. And you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge in place into place. So you can use the up down left and right keys. And so I'm going to really zoom in command plus control plus on Windows. And I'm going to nudge these together, like that. And so I'm just looking at the stars here, I'm trying to make sure that they're perfectly overlapping. And you can see this is actually sort of interesting too. If I turn this layer off and on, you can see it's not quite aligned yet, right? It should be okay. That's better. But why does it still look weird when I turn this off and on? Because the focus is actually slightly worse in this JPEG one than this one, right? You can see the stars are getting slightly better and the nebula is slightly blurrier. So if you have a lot of pictures you took, and you have you looking through and you're like, oh, this one's sharp, this one's actually sort of blurry, you can always just delete this one out of the stack, you can just hit the trash can here. Since this is just a demonstration, and I haven't taken that many photos, I will keep this in the stack. But normally, if you're being really picky, you might delete this one when you see that it's slightly out of focus like this. Okay, and then we're going to go ahead and turn the opacity of this one back up to 100%, turn on the visibility of this next one, and turn down its opacity so that we can line it up, just like we did the last one. And I can use my keyboard, the arrow keys to nudge this into place. You can see the trapezium cluster right there. And when I'm happy with the placement, I'll just go ahead and turn the opacity back up of that layer and go on to the next one. And you just keep doing this, you turn down the opacity, you line up the next layer using the bright stars, and then turn back up the opacity. Okay, and that's it. We've now lined up all the different images using the stars, right? So they're all in different places, but they were lined them all up. And now we want to select all of them. So click on the top layer, scroll down to the bottom, hold down shift key on your keyboard and click on the bottom layer that selected all the layers here. And you're going to go to the layer menu, go down to smart objects and click convert to smart object. Okay, so it's now all one object here, we could rename it, I'm going to call it Orion stacked. It's not actually stacked yet, it's just a smart object, but to stack it we go back to the layer menu, go down to smart objects, go down to stack mode, and choose mean or median. They both can work well. I'll choose mean for this one. Okay, and it's stacked all of those images together. Now you can see that that created a lot of artifacts, right, because the eyepiece view changed. And so we have a lot of weird stuff going on. But if we look at just the Orion Nebula here, hopefully what you can see is that it's a lot smoother, it's a lot more noise free than this image. This image is sharper because it's just that single well exposed image, it's not, it wasn't too long, so it's going to be sharper. But this image is a lot more has a lot more going on in terms of the extent of the Nebula. And it's a much better signal to noise ratio. So we can stretch it more and add more saturation and do things like that without the image falling apart due to noise, like with this image. Okay, so that's the first thing. Next, let's change this image a little bit to get rid of these artifacts. So I'm going to do that by creating a circular layer mask. It's the second tool down. And if you see the rectangular selection, just click and hold and choose elliptical marquee tool. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to position my cursor right in the middle of the good view of Orion Nebula here. Start dragging out and you can see that I get this oval selection. Then I'm going to hold down alt and shift that will make it into a circular selection. That looks about the right size. I can then nudge it into place with my arrow keys. And I want this part right here. Okay, and then I'm going to click this add a layer mask button. It's the third button down here at the bottom of the layers panel. So now we've cut out all those artifacts and things. But the background is now transparent. So let's go ahead and just add a new layer, put it on the bottom, and we'll fill this layer with black. So we'll just go edit, fill, fill with black. Okay, good. Now I just want to center this, the Orion stacked layer. So I'll just go back to my move tool and I'll just center it here in view. Okay, so now comes the fun part. We can play around with this image a little bit, see how far we can take it. So let's go to the adjustments panel and let's do a curves adjustment. And let's make it a little bit brighter. You can maybe add a little bit of a S curve where you take one point and make it a little brighter. And then you add a little contrast with this point, something like that. And let's add some saturation. So we'll just go to hue slash saturation, add some saturation here. Oh, yeah, that's looking cool. All that red and pink comes out, but we don't have the noise like we did with this one, right? But here's the big issue with this one, right? It's holding up to brightening and saturation much better because we stacked it. But it's a lot blurrier here in the core where we want to see more of that detail. So what we can do now is we can take this image, put it on top. So I'm just going to go ahead and do file, place, or place embedded, sorry. Okay, so now this is on top. I'm going to turn down the opacity of it so that we can move it into the right place on top of the stacked image. I'm just going to use the bright stars here to do this. Okay, cool. So now we have this placed correctly. And we just want to bring in details from the core area. So I'm going to add a layer mask. And I'm going to fill that layer mask with black. So I'm going to go edit fill, fill it with black. So now nothing from this layer is showing. But then what we can do is we can take a brush, you can click B for brush or it's this tool right here in the middle. Make sure that we're painting in white. So if you don't see white on top here, just go ahead and click this little double arrow to put white on top. And I can paint in the core details from this image, just using my brush. Now, if you do this at full opacity, it's going to make that core very dark. So I'm going to do it at a little bit reduced opacity before we added the core details. And after now, it maybe looks a little bit too artificial now because we darkened that so much. So what we can do now is just brighten just this layer. So I'm going to just do image adjustments, levels. And I'm just going to brighten that layer, just taking this mid tone slider, moving it a little bit to the left until it blends in with the rest of the image. See there is before, and we just want it to blend in a little bit better. Okay, so here's before we added the core details, and there's after. And you can see there's a lot more details in there now. Okay, and then from here, you can do other things. You can try sharpening up the image a little bit. So to do that, what I'd recommend is if you're on Mac, press Command, Option, Shift E. If you're on Windows, it's Control, Alt, Shift E on your keyboard, that will make a new from visible layer. And I'm just going to call this sharpen test. And we can try sharpening this image a little bit. So on the sharpen test layer there, I'm going to do filter, sharpen, unsharp mask. And I'll just play around with these sliders. And you can turn off and on the preview to see if you like what it's doing. Okay, I like that. Of course, for your image, these values might be completely different. I'm just doing this to make it how I want it to look. Okay. So that's the sharpen test. I sharpened it up a little bit. And I think that's done. I this may have seemed super simple or super advanced, depending on how much you've used Photoshop. But hopefully it was helpful, even if you take away something from it, like the stacking process or how to sharpen or add saturation, hopefully you got something out of this little demo using my iPhone and a telescope and just no tracker just stacking some photos together. And we get to see, you know, some really nice detail in the trapezium region of Orion, but also some of this extended nebulosity as well. So that's it for this one. Hope you enjoyed this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.