 I have 5 different setups for astrophotography here, and tonight they are all going to be centered on one patch of sky, the core of our Milky Way galaxy, in an epic one night shootout. The contenders are using your smartphone with a DIY hand turned tracker, a basic DSLR and kit lens on a tripod, a basic DSLR and fast telephoto lens on a motorized star tracker, a modified DSLR and a small refractor telescope on a budget go-to mount, and lastly a dedicated monocamera with LRGB filters in a motorized filter wheel and a premium refractor with an automated focuser all on a heavy go-to mount. Welcome my name is Nico Carver and I'm interested in helping people explore this wonderful hobby we call astrophotography, which simply means photographing the night sky. I'll show you some different approaches to astrophotography in terms of the gear that you may choose to use to shoot the night sky, and I'll walk through how each system works, how you set each one up to get the best results possible, and of course we're going to compare the final images that I've produced with each kit all in one night. This is a shootout in the sense that the other night I shot the same patch of sky with each kit, but it's by no means a scientific test as the systems are just too different in nature to try to closely match settings. So it's not apples to apples here, it's more apples to oranges to passion fruit, but that's the point. For fans of short videos, this is probably not going to be one of those, but check out my channel and subscribe because I've been putting out a lot of shorter videos recently, including a series you may have seen of five-minute and under-videos every Friday that I'm calling five-minute Fridays. First off, I want to give a huge thank you to High Point Scientific, which is a great online store for all things astronomy and astrophotography. They have telescopes, mounts, cameras, accessories, really everything that you'd need to get started. And this is not sponsored by them, meaning that no money is exchanged hands, but in my request High Point Scientific did lend me the Skywatcher EQM35 mount and the Apertura 72mm refractor, which came with a matching field flattener. This is a huge help because going forward with this channel, I can't afford to buy everything that I want to review and show you in these videos, but that said, everything else in this video are things that I've personally bought over the years. I really have way too much stuff, but I can always do more giveaways. I wanted to say that a number of these cameras and the Skywatcher Star Adventure and things like that are things that I've bought specifically for this channel with proceeds from my Patreon campaign, which really keeps this channel going. So another huge thanks to everyone who supports me over on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. And if you're interested, it starts at just $1 per month, and there's tons of benefits in joining my community over on Patreon, including participation in imaging challenges, exclusive giveaways, exclusive channels on my Discord server, zoom chats, all kinds of stuff. The first kit we're looking at here may look a little bit strange if you're new to amateurst or photography or new to my channel. This is a device that I built to manually track the night sky. It costs about $30 in parts to make the tracker. And if you're interested in building it, I have a video for that, of course. I'll link it in the right corner here and also in the video description. The rest of the $100 for this kit is used for buying a sturdy tripod that I got. You could get used and a clamp for your smartphone. I'm not including the cost of the smartphone itself because I'm guessing most people have access to a phone or some kind of camera. Another thing I want to point out with this kit is I call it the DIYer because my thinking with this one is just trying to get the most out of things you have around the house or can build for pretty cheap, which is why I don't include the cost of the smartphone itself. Because the point is really just use any camera you can get your hands on, whether it's in a smartphone or a point-and-shoot or whatever it is and put it on top of this barn door tracker. And with any of these cameras, including the smartphone, it's worth seeing if the camera shoots in raw format and use that rather than JPEG if that's an option. If it only shoots JPEG, that's okay too for this. Just make sure you pick the highest quality JPEG option. Let's now go through the steps of setting up the DIYer. Thank you to Maggie so much for assisting with the B-roll here. So we start by putting the tripod on solid ground and pointing it roughly north or south if you're in the southern hemisphere. And then we put the barn door tracker on, make sure it's securely attached. And then the same thing, we put our phone or whatever camera you're using on top of the barn door tracker. Then comes polar alignment. In the northern hemisphere, a cheap way to do this is just with a basic sighting device, like a little straw. I'm using a metal drinking straw here. And we just need to line up the pole star, which is Polaris, which is pretty close to the North Celestial pole. Okay, then after we're polar aligned, we're just going to take the phone, point it at the center of the Milky Way, work out some of the settings here in the camera app. The app that comes on my Huawei phone is very good for giving me pretty much full control over the settings in Pro mode. But if your native camera app isn't very good, just check out your app store, your Google Play store, as there are a number of alternative apps these days. I've heard about Nightcap camera for iOS and DeepSky camera for Android are two really good apps I've heard. Okay, let's talk about the pros and cons of this kit. The pros are it's inexpensive. If you're using a camera you already have around like a smartphone, it's very quick to set up. It's pretty lightweight. The cons are you're limited to very wide field, both due to how the tracker works. But also just if you're using a smartphone, it probably only has like wide angle lenses. Another con and sort of a big one for me actually is that it can get sort of tiring and boring because you're manually moving the clock wheel for the entire time. And this could be overcome by adding a small motor to the tracker, which is something I'm really interested in trying. Okay, the last con is that it requires a lot of tinkering to get good results. Both the manual barn door tracker and the phone required a lot of trial and error with both technique and with settings before I could really get anything that I liked. And this isn't necessarily a con. It's just something to keep in mind. If you don't like tinkering, then this kit is probably not the one for you. Okay, let's look at the image I produced now. I'm pretty happy with it. The colors look reasonably good. The star color, we got some nice detail on the large dark nebulae in the Milky Way, and it shows off some of the other kits in the bottom right corner here in the foreground that we're going to be talking about. This next kit I loved just because of how simple it is. Hence the nickname I picked for it, the keeping it simple. What you need for this kit is just any DSLR or mirrorless camera with the wide angle zoom kit lens that came with it. And we're going to use the kit lens all the way zoomed out. So in my case, that's 18 millimeter focal length. I'm using a Canon T seven here, which is their most affordable DSLR. The only other two pieces of gear I used are a tripod. And again, I prefer a used tripod. If you can get one from like a good brand. And then lastly, we have this super cheap little shutter release cable here. This thing is pretty great because it doesn't even take batteries. It's just a simple circuit with some wires and a little switch. This button, which, um, if you, you know, press it down, it takes a picture. If you press halfway, it focuses. If you have it on autofocus and then you can also lock it like that. And so I've used this before as a manual bulb timer, like just like lock it, wait for five minutes and then unlock it. Um, but a commenter on an older video of mine pointed out that you can just put a DSLR on continuous shooting mode and then lock the switch. And the camera will continuously keep taking photos until you either unlock the switch or the battery runs out or your memory card fills. And I love this because it's simple. And it does exactly what I want in nothing more. And I don't have to worry about what is interval versus, uh, delay mean or that kind of thing. And it's also cheaper than an intervalometer. I don't have to worry about batteries since it doesn't take any. So the only time I still use an intervalometer is if I'm taking pictures longer than 30 seconds each. And that usually only comes up once you add tracking, which we'll get to next setup for the keeping it simple is a breeze. You just plop down the tripod, add the camera pointed at a bright star or planet manually focused by making that bright star as small as possible in the live view with 10 times zoom turned on. And once you're focused, you pointed at what you are shooting in this case, the Milky Way core, you lock the shutter release and let it take hundreds of photos. And for super wide angle stuff like this at 18 millimeters, we don't really even have to recenter that often. I always just recenter when I check focus, which depending on how much the temperature is changing, I usually do every 20, 30, 40 minutes, something like that. So I think I recentered once during the night and I took like 600 pictures. The settings were ISO 3200, 10 seconds exposure lens, wide open at F 3.5. The reason I went to 10 seconds, even though that was a little bit past what the MPF rule suggested is F 3.5 is a little bit slower than I'm usually at. So I wanted to get as much light in as I could to bring down the noise. Here what I see as the pros and cons of this setup, the pros are it's very simple and it's pretty low effort. The setup time is just very fast. You just need to focus, point it, Milky Way starts snapping away. It's relatively low cost. If you're a photographer, you might already have a camera and lens you can use and a tripod and the shutter release cable. And it's pretty easy to upgrade. You just need to upgrade the lens to get much better results. Now speaking of the results, I'd say that's the only con is that the results aren't like super great. They're not that much better than the DIY or where we had the barn door tracker. But the reason is I think because the kit lens is just a little bit soft. So you could consider a lens upgrade to get better performance. Um, you know, if you want to throw money at it, or if you're a tinkerer, you could combine this kit with the DIY or so if you have a DSLR, you can put that on the barn door tracker for $30. You have tracking and that's going to give you better results too. Anyways, let's get to the final image. This is the final stacked image that I made with the kit. The, the kit lens is, you can see really blots, the blue stars. Some people actually, I think find this pretty. I think that it is okay. It makes them a little bit overpowering though, but all in all, you know, it's a nice picture of the new way core. And I think shows a little bit more detail than the smartphone shot. Okay. The name of this one is of course a little bit tongue in cheek. It's, it's, but it's true that many people who go as far as getting a small star tracker, like the sky watch or star adventure, I found get really hooked on astrophotography because they realize how fun it is. And so then they spend a lot more eventually to get the full go to mount and telescope, which is what we'll cover next. But the gateway drug is a very capable kit that opens you up to many new possibilities since the star adventure can track the night sky with not just a wide angle lens, but a telephoto lens. And in this case I'm using a prime telephoto called the Rokinon 135 f2, which is a great value for astrophotography. I got mine for $450 when it was on sale. They go on sale frequently. And the reason it's a great value is because it's pretty sharp, wide open at f2. It was pretty amazing. The Batonov mask and the USB do heater strip are optional, but they don't really add too much to the cost, especially if like me, you can 3D print your Batonov mask from a friend or a library. The Batonov mask, if you're unfamiliar, is a focusing aid that works well with telephoto lenses and with telescopes. And you just point it at a bright star and you line up the central line with this X pattern that the star forms when you put the mask on. You have to remember to take the mask back off, but then you have perfect focus. The do heater is to keep the lens from fogging up. Really, we could use this on any of the kits, but I'm just with this kit since we're like a little bit more advanced, I think you probably should get the do heater, especially if you are in a place with high humidity or if you're going to be pointing the lens more up. If the lens is pretty perpendicular, then the, um, the lens hood usually can prevent most do from falling on the glass. Um, but in the summer, I do recommend a do heater. This setup is a little bit more involved. Uh, we need to get everything securely attached. The star adventure goes directly on the tripod legs. And then we put this thing called the declination bracket in the clamp on the star adventure. Finally, the camera and the lens go on top of that. Then we need to make sure that it's balanced between the camera and the counterweight. This is so we don't put too much stress on the gears, which are turning everything after that's done. Uh, we look through a tiny little telescope built into the tracker called a polar alignment scope. And this is how we line it up with, uh, the North celestial pole or the South celestial pole with polar alignment done. We then turn to focusing the main lens. And this time, like I said, if you have a Bobanov mask, you can use one. If not, just make the stars as small as possible. We then point the telescope at our target. Unlike the previous two kits, we now need to do a bit more of a precision pointing, um, because to get it framed up how we want, cause we're not just pointing at the Milky way. We want to point at the really interesting part, which for me is the lagoon and triphid right in the center there. And so, uh, this can be frustrating to know how to point and how to find things in the night sky. It's a learning process. It takes many nights, but I do have a video on some tips to use technology to help you out a little bit, but don't expect to be great at it right away. Okay. With all of that done, we've taken a test shot. We know we're pointed correctly. We're in focus. We then turn on tracking on the star adventure program, the intervalometer to take, let's say a hundred shots. And after about a hundred shots at 30 seconds each, that's time that I'd like to check focus. If focus looks good, then I'll take another hundred. If not, then I'll refocus and then reprogram the intervalometer, take another hundred then at the end of the night, we're going to take our calibration frames, which are our dark bias and flats. Um, with the flats you do need some kind of white light source. So like an iPad works well, a tracing tablet, anything that's sort of flat and white, you just put that right on top of the lens to take the flats. I go into a lot more detail about how to take these things in sort of my start to finish videos. So I'm not going to go into all of that now, since this is just more about comparison and how you set these different things up. The pros of this kit are it's a still pretty lightweight and portable. You can definitely take it on an airplane as I have many times before, and it's pretty versatile. We could, we could use it for tracked Milky Way shooting with a wide angle lens, or like we're doing here, focusing on some large nebulae like Lagoon and Trifid with a telephoto lens or a small telescope. It works with stuff you may already have, like it works with the tripod. It works with a camera and lens. So instead of spending, you know, the full 1500, you may just be spending 425 to get the Star Tracker. And I really liked that the Star Tracker runs for a long time on AA batteries. Very convenient. The cons are that the setup time is starting to get longer, especially if you're new to astrophotography, both polar alignment and finding objects at higher focal length can, can take a bit of time. Alaskan is that I've heard for many that the Star Tracker is not available in their country. So it can be frustrating to see all these videos about how great it is. And then not be able to buy one. Okay. Let's look at what I produced with this setup. This was 300 lights at 30 seconds each. So about two and a half hours total. I shot at ISO 3200 with the Rokinon wide open at F2. As I said earlier, I did get the calibration frames with this one. So 50 each of darks, bias and flats. And you can see we got some great detail on the Lagoon and Triphid Nebulae here, as well as the Starfield. The Rokinon lens I think is very impressive on the stars, especially on a crop sensor camera. Like I was using a Canon T7. This mountain telescope for, for this kit, getting serious were lent to me by the fine folks at High Point Scientific. And so this was only my second night shooting with this mountain telescope. I did a brief test a couple of nights before to make sure it was all working okay, which it was. And then this was my first real experience shooting with it. And I was very impressed by both the mount and the telescope. The mount again is a Skywatcher EQM 35 mount. And it does have some faults. The accuracy of the go-to system with just the hand controller, what we'd call the pointing accuracy, it wasn't that impressive. But the tracking, which is more important to me, was, was great. For 30 second exposures at a focal length of 430 millimeters with this Apertura refractor, I was getting perfect stars every, every single shot. I didn't have any trailing issues. The stars looked great across the field. For the camera, I got a barely used Canon T7 off eBay for 350. And then I had it modified for 300 from astrogear.net. And I'll be doing more of a review of different kinds of DSLR modifications and future videos. Now for the accessories, I decided to keep it pretty simple. We could have gone a lot with more stuff here, but I just went with like a do-heater controller, a do-heater strap for the telescope. I'm controlling the DSLR with an inner volometer. And I used a Bodinov mask for focusing. Now you, of course, can add a lot more to this kit. Auto guiding, computer control, automated focusing, all this kind of stuff. But I was interested in just keeping it to the basics to keep it sort of to the minimal kit for a telescope. And for me, this is the really the base kit that I'd suggest if you want to get into astrophotography with a telescope. I wouldn't try to spend much less than this. Now to power it all, I was feeding both this kit and the next kit I'll show you of one big deep cycle lead acid battery, which is a pretty affordable battery given the huge capacity. But the downside of that kind of battery is that it's super heavy. The truth is though, I would never really consider this a portable kit. You really need a car to bring all this stuff to a dark site. So you couldn't hike with this. Just the tripod is huge. So the heaviness of the battery doesn't matter too much to me, as long as I can safely lift it out of the car. Setup of this one is a bit more complex than the last one. It just, uh, it takes a little bit more time. We just need to get everything securely attached to the mount. We, we balance it. We polar align with the built in polar scope. We turn everything on. And then there's a bit of setup. There is the hand controller setup. We have to feed it some information like our location or GPS location. You can get all this information from a smartphone app, like polar finder pro. Uh, you just type it in here. Then we go through a three star alignment process. And this is to train the go to system and it's, it's going to point the telescope at different bright stars. And then you have to center them on your DSLR screen by pressing left, right up and down arrows on the hand controller. Now, even after I did this, the go tos were still about a degree off. And, um, so I really should have brought like a tell rad, some kind of finder scope cause this could really get frustrating fast. If you're doing go tos and they're off. The caveat I'll mention is that this is again, was just my second night using it. So I could maybe there's some way to fine tune the pointing. Um, one way of course is you can connect it to a computer and then you can plate solve to correct the pointing. And that's really fast and good. The pros of this setup are we can accurately track at 430 millimeters, which gives us a much more detailed view of deep sky objects. Another pro is that the mount can handle the weight of a telescope and telescopes can be really optimized for astrophotography more so than camera lenses. It also has more potential for upgrades. We can, as I mentioned, we could add complete automation if we wanted to the cons are there is much more to learn here before you can get good results. And the kid is way too heavy and bulky at this point to hike or fly with it. Uh, it's really just like a, you can put it in your car and bring it somewhere. All right. And here is the final image. I was super impressed by this, not a huge amount of effort to get really nice results. This is only 159 lights at 30 seconds each. So under 90 minutes total at an F ratio of F six ISO 3200. The star rendering is amazing. The field flatener is clearly doing its job as the stars look round in the corners. It's amazing to me that the whole telescope and field flatener is only $700. If you get them as a set, because these stars look near perfect. I didn't see any excessive star bloat or color fringing. So I think this is going to be really hard to beat, but let's see if the next kid can do it. This is my personal kit that I've been slowly adding to and upgrading parts over the years. At this point, almost everything in it has been upgraded at least once. And that's how I can afford something like this. I've never had this much money all at once, but I just save up for one new upgrade or thing at a time. If I want a new telescope, I can then offset the cost a bit by selling my old one. So to step through this, the EQ six arm mount you may have heard of, because it's just a tremendous value at around $1,600 for a mount that will reliably holds like 30s plus pounds and has, you know, reasonably good and reliable pointing and tracking. The camera I'm using, I also love it's relatively new to me, but so far so good. The QHY 268M it's a mono camera, meaning I need filters in front of it. And I use two inch filters from Antlia and a QHY seven position filter wheel. LRGB and the three main narrowband filters being sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen alpha for guiding. I use an off access guider with the ZWO ASI 290 mini. The telescope is a stellar view SVQ 86 that they only made a very limited run of in 2018. So I'm very happy to have gotten one because I love it. It has an aperture of 86 millimeters focal length of 464. So that makes it a focal ratio of 5.4. And then I have a bunch of accessories. The main ones are I have an optech auto focus system, a Pegasus pocket power box for power and do heater stuff, and then a QHY pole master for its computer assisted polar alignment. The setup of this one is actually not too bad because I've really refined it over the years and keep most things connected to the top of the telescope. So I can just plop the whole thing on connect a few wires, balance it, and then basically the rest of the setup is on the laptop. I have a whole video on how I do this kind of setup. It might need updating because I made it a few years ago now, but most of it I think is still how I do it. It's still good information. I still use all the same programs I use then like EQ Mod, cartouciel, PhD to pole master and sequence generator pro. I'm not going to go deep into the software stuff, but I'll just say that there are so many options for software that control your gear that it can be a little bit overwhelming if you're a beginner, but I just suggest trying things out, seeing if you like them, don't feel pressured to use something just because someone else does or something like that, use whatever makes sense to you. For me, once I've learned a process that is giving me good data, I don't really feel the need to change unless I have to for some reason. Once I hit start, uh, start sequence on sequence generator pro, everything is automated. It does an automated focus routine every half hour. It guides and dithers on its own. It changes the filters on its own. If the object, if the object I'm shooting crosses the meridian, it will flip the telescope to the other side of the mount. So it can continue tracking. And this is really what you are paying for with something like this. It's, it's just the peace of mind that you can leave it alone. You don't have to babysit it and it will be reliable, give you reliably good data. And for me, this is worth a lot because I can then work on big multi-year projects that I enjoy with my main kit while I'm testing things, making YouTube videos, helping friends and just enjoying the night sky. So for me, the main pros of this setup are one, automation, two reliable data quality and three great narrow band data, even from the city. This isn't something I'm going to really talk about in this video, but I have three nanometer and Lita narrow band filters for this kit. And that lets me image from Somerville where I live, which is Bordel eight right next to downtown Boston. Now the cons are this kid is very heavy and bulky. It's expensive and it's complex. And the main problem with complexity is if something goes wrong, there are so many possibilities for what it could be, uh, because there are literally dozens and dozens of possible points of failure with a kit like this one. But I've learned two things about complex astro setups over the years. First one, always bring extra cables for everything in your kid. You know, you want an extra cable. And if something isn't connecting or something's acting weird, try switching out the cable because I can't tell you how many times that's worked for some reason. Uh, even if I don't think the cables bad changing the cable, then it works. The second thing is once everything's updated on your laptop or your Raspberry Pi or whatever you're using, don't update the software. And I know sometimes you maybe you want to update the software because there's a new feature or something. If you have to update, do it on a new moon, see if anything breaks. If you, and then, you know, have a plan for rolling back to your stable setup, if something goes wrong. Okay. Looking at the final image, this is 20 luminance frames and 10 each of red, green, and blue, all at two minutes each. So a total of one hour, 40 minutes. I think the main things that make it stand apart a bit from the last image with the last kit is that it's already pretty low noise. And that's mostly thanks to this amazing camera, the QHY268M, the star color and the contrast in general are a little bit more pleasing to me. I mean, I'm sure I could match the two images better, uh, in terms of color and processing, but I basically just did very minimal processing. You had to show you more of the baseline differences between these different kits. And again, I don't think that in terms of just normal color image performance that the lifer kit is worth four times more than the getting serious kit, it's really when you add in narrow band capabilities and all the automation that you start to get why it's so much more expensive for that sort of peace of mind. Now that we have a feel for each kit, let's do some comparisons. And let's start with the weight of each kit. The total weight of the DIYer is seven pounds or 3.2 kilograms. I can easily lift the whole thing with one arm, move it around. I'd say that it would be pretty easy just to strap it to a backpack and hike with it. If you want the keeping it simple is even lighter at 5.5 pounds or 2.5 kilograms, definitely easy to hike with the total weight of the gateway drug is about 13 pounds or 5.9 kilograms. Definitely still can hike with it, but it's more than double the weight of either of the first two kits. And the total weight of the getting serious kit is 31.2 pounds or 14.2 kilograms. And this is without the lead acid battery I used to power it, which alone weighs 59 pounds or 26.8 kilograms. This is the kind of setup where I don't want to move it and any further than I have to the reason I separated the battery out from the total weight is because if the weight of the battery was a concern, you could definitely get a lighter battery. The big lithium batteries are still substantially more expensive than a lead acid, but I think the prices have been falling a bit in recent years and the lithium battery batteries will be much, much lighter like around 10 pounds. The total weight of the lifer is 103 pounds or 46.7 kilograms. And that's without the lead acid battery, which again is an additional 59 pounds. So why a three times increase in weight from the getting serious? Well, the main thing is the EQ 6R is a good reliable mount partly because they just make it super heavy. The mount head alone is like 40 pounds. The tripod is 15 or 16 pounds. And then you have 22 pounds of counterweights. And so before we even add my tricked out telescope, we're at about 77 pounds with the EQ 6R. The good thing about it being so heavy is that makes it more resistant to things like wind and vibration, which can easily ruin astrophotos. But the downside of it being heavy is that it's quite the pain to move it around. I live on a third floor apartment. So bringing all this stuff down and up to the car every night I want to image is a bit of a pain. Another comparison that I find interesting is, you know, from the moment that you start taking the kit out of the car to when you start taking images of the night sky is all what I'd call setup time. So we're going to compare the setup times that I recorded for each kit. The DIY required little setup is just sort of putting the tracker on the phone on the tripod, very roughly polar lighting, you know, aiming the phone at the Milky Way, finding focus. So with practice, the total for me has is down to eight minutes with that kit. With all these numbers, keep in mind that I've practiced. I'm an experienced astrophotographer. So starting out, don't try to like match these. It's really just a point of comparison between the different kits. The keeping it simple required nothing but focus and pointing the camera at the Milky Way. So it only took me three minutes to set up. The gateway drug required putting it together, balancing, polar alignment, focusing, finding your target and finding the target was a bit hard the other night because I forgot all kinds of finder devices. So it took me 28 minutes, but I think if I had remembered a finder device, I could have brought that down to 20 minutes. The getting serious kit required putting it together, balancing, polar aligning, setting up the hand controller, performing a three star alignment and then going to the Laguna Nebula, but finding that it was off. So then having to really find it and then focusing in total, it took me 35 minutes. But with practice and a finder scope, I'm sure that I could probably get that down to like 30 minutes. The lifer is the kit that I use most often. And so it's very much in my muscle memory. And I also have tried to make the setup of it as efficient as possible since I do it so often. So I have it down to 16 minutes when I go pretty fast. I think the main takeaway from this comparison is, you know, especially with the lifer being faster, the middle two, is that a more complex setup doesn't necessarily mean longer setup time. Because there's a lot of ways that you can make the setup more efficient. And one of those is actually controlling a lot of things through the computer can actually make you faster because plate solving, for instance, makes finding things so much faster. Another comparison that's semi related is active time, meaning the time that you actively have to sit there with the kit doing something. And I'll measure this in terms of percentages. The DIYer is 100% active time because I'm actively moving the wheel to track. So if I get an hour of data, that means that I'm sitting there for an hour moving the wheel. With the keep in it simple, if you don't take any calibration frames and you don't recenter, it's maybe 0%. But for me, it was 5% because I did check focus and recenter once. With the gateway drug, it just depends sort of on how much you check things like how much you check focus and the tracking is working. But I'd say it's somewhere between 5% and 10% because you're also I also took calibration frames. It's the same exact thing with the getting serious. I, you know, 5% to 10% something like that. I should point out, though, that with neither setup that I feel the need to manually do a meridian flip and then recenter and all that because it didn't look like there was any danger of running into the tripod legs. So I didn't do a meridian flip. But if I had that, probably would have added added to the active time, it probably would have climbed above 10% with either setup. With the lifer, as I've mentioned, everything is automated focusing, blah, blah, blah. So the active time is 0%. And you might be wondering, well, what about calibration frames? I do those at home with the lifer because everything stays connected so I can even do flats at home. So there's the, you know, after I get it set up, it's all passive. I don't have to, I don't have to worry about it with that kit. Okay, we've made it to the final comparison, which is just the actual images themselves that I took with each kit. I'll quickly show each one full screen. And then we can look at some crops. I didn't really try to have any kind of consistent workflow in processing here. I just made them look as best as they could with simple processing techniques like curves and saturation that I stacked. Here are some crops now at 100% zoom. These are centered on the lagoon nebula, sort of like in my thumbnail for the video. And then now here is centered on the triphid nebula. Again, all of these finished photos plus my unprocessed stacked tiffs for each kit is available at a link in the description. And I've also arranged these as kits with affiliate links to each item on kit.co slash nebula photos. And you can find that link in the video description as well. Hope this was helpful to you all out there. Since this is a long video, you're now seeing the names of all my Patreon supporters. If you want to be in the credits to any long video like this, you can sign up over on patreon.com slash nebula photos. In addition to having your name in the credits, as you're seeing now, there are lots of benefits to joining us over on Patreon. I organize a monthly imaging challenge, which is a lot of fun. And the winning images each month are published on my Instagram and also on an Astroven group. I also do zoom chats where you can ask me questions live. We've been doing those on Sundays. So it's really worth your while to sign up so you don't miss out. Well, till next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.