 I've put together the best deep sky astrophotography kit if you're starting from scratch with $2,000 US dollars today. This kit is lightweight, it's easy to use, but the results that you can get out of this kit are mind blowing. I mean, look at the detail on the Horsehead Nebula here. In this video, I'm going to walk you through all of the parts in this kit, explaining what each part does, then I'm going to demonstrate how to use this kit under the night sky to get the best results possible, and I'll show you how I processed my photo to get to this final result. Hello, if you're new to my channel, my name is Nico Carver and my passion is astrophotography, specifically shooting Nebulae, which are these beautiful, colorful clouds of gas and dust out there in our Milky Way galaxy. And the amazing thing is that we can capture Nebulae really well with just a small investment in photography gear. The main idea behind this video comes from a question I get a lot, which is, I have this much money, I'm brand new to all this, what should I buy? And I usually don't give an answer right away. I ask more questions about what this person's goals are, what kind of light pollution level they have, how complex they want their setup to be, and these kinds of questions allow me to figure out the best way to spend a given budget given that person's particular goals and situation. And if you're interested in that kind of more individual back and forth with me, I have a Patreon campaign where I'm happy to give that kind of individual support for anyone that signs up. It starts at just $1 per month. And with that said, how am I claiming that this is the best you can get for $2,000? Well, it's not necessarily going to be the best kit for every person, because for instance, if your goal is to get a really nice photo of Saturn, for example, then this kid is going to suck for that. You need a big telescope with more aperture and focal length. And so for $2,000, if you were after the planet, something like a Celestron Nexstar 8SE and a $300 planetary camera would do you much better. So that's something I want to emphasize that this is what I think the ultimate $2,000 kit is for someone that's really into shooting wide field deep sky like I do. So big, beautiful star fields where you can get really creative with the composition by picking fields with lots of nebulae and making the whole photo interesting with bright stars. And I just really dig those kinds of shots. And deep sky, by the way, if you've never heard that term, that just means photographing things out in space that are outside of our own solar system. So nebulae, galaxies, star clusters, those are the main three deep sky objects that amateur astrophotographers like to focus on because they're the most photogenic. Of course you can photograph, you know, other deep sky objects like quasar, but it just doesn't look like much. It just would look like a little red spot. Anyways, when we're talking wide field deep sky, that's what this kit is good for. It's shooting large nebulae and big star fields with lots of nebulae in them. There are some galaxies that are close by we call them in our local group. And the kit, this kit will work really well for those large galaxies too. So the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, M31, M33 for us in the Northern Hemisphere. And then the large and small Magellanic clouds in the Southern Hemisphere. Those four galaxies are going to work really well with this kit. In this example shot that I shot with the kit, that's the Orion constellation of course. And it's a great starting place for this kit if you're in the right season for it. We're now sort of leaving the winter constellation season if you're in the North, but it comes back every year. But even though Orion's leaving, there are many other constellations that will work really well for these kinds of compositions with this kit, including Cygnus, Cepheus, Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, Corina, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere. And so anyways, let's go ahead and move on. But now that we've talked about the type of astrophotography that this kit excels at, we're going to break down each part of the kit and what each part does. So let's start with the lens here. This is the Rokinon 135 millimeter F2. It's also sold under the brand name Samyang, which is actually the company's name. It's an easy recommendation because I can't think of any other lens at this price point under $500 that can match this lens in terms of sharpness. It's sharp even wide open at F2, but especially if you stop down to F2.8. And it's also a well corrected lens, meaning the star shapes are pretty good even in the corners of the frame and especially with an APS-C, but even on full frame. There's a little bit of color fringing that's called chromatic aberration, but it's pretty manageable in processing because the stars are so round. It's easy to remove that chromatic aberration. It's also a fast lens, meaning you can capture more photons from your deep sky object in the same amount of total time if you compared it to a slower lens. So it's easier to get a better picture faster with this lens. This lens is fully manual if you get the Canon version. This Nikon version is manual when it comes to focusing here, but it does have electronic aperture control, which is actually pretty handy in a good feature because then it actually will remember what aperture setting you had when you look at the metadata in something like Photoshop or Bridge or Lightroom. So I really like that. My recommended next step up from this lens would be something like a William Optics Redcat 51, which is a small telescope. It's slower than the Rokinon. It's a fixed f 4.9, but it's also better corrected and it has a focal length of 250 millimeters. The reason that I picked the Rokinon over the Redcat was mostly just to keep this kit at $2,000. And I honestly think also that 135 millimeter focal length is a better choice with this Star Tracker. I know that a lot of people have had success with the Redcat on the Star Adventure, but then you may have to add on auto guiding and then you're starting to hit up against the weight limit of the tracker. So I actually went with the Rokinon for a few reasons here beyond just the lower price. Okay, next up we have the camera. And here I'm going with an Astro modified full spectrum Nikon D5300 DSLR. And again, this is considered a great value in astro imaging. The D5300 was never a very expensive DSLR, but it hits above its price point in terms of being a very low noise sensor. It's going to give you really clean astrophotography data. This one was sent to me by Night Sky Camera, which is a great business based out of Vancouver, Canada, that both sells modified cameras and also will modify your camera if you want to send it to them. So thank you so much to Night Sky Camera. And this D5300, they modified full spectrum, meaning it can be used for daytime infrared photography. And for Deep Sky, I find that with the Rokinon at least, I want to keep that increased sensitivity for the emission nebulae, but leaving it open to the infrared makes so many stars visible and also bloats the stars a little bit. So the next piece of this kit that I've added here is a filter, a front-mounted filter here. And this is an IR cut filter, but an IR cut filter that's specially designed for astrophotography. So it passes the H-Alpha line associated with those red nebulae, but it blocks the infrared light. So here's a quick comparison without the filter and then with it. And you can see that it does help with keeping the stars from overtaking the image too much, but it's still passing that HA line just fine. Next up, we have the Star Tracker. And I'm suggesting the Tridentru Skywatcher Star Adventurer Pro Pack. This guy is really easy to use. It runs off four double A's or a battery pack. You can control it from the app on your smartphone or just forget the Wi-Fi and use the dial to start it tracking. And while it's not perfect in all its features, I find that it's very reliable for basic tracking, which is what it's really designed to do. And there are different options when buying this tracker, but I'd only consider the Pro Pack because this declination bracket and the counterweight system, they're all essential if you want to use this tracker with a telephoto lens like I am here. And then to go with the Star Adventure, we need a tripod. And I'm suggesting here, just getting a used Monfrotto or Bogan tripod off eBay. These aluminum Monfrotto tripods, they just last forever. They're good and sturdy. They usually don't require any maintenance and they just work. So with a tripod, you don't need any kind of head if you're getting the Star Adventurer Pro Pack because the Star Tracker actually becomes the tripod's head. So you just need the tripod legs and they should have a 3 eighth inch stud at the top. Okay, now we're getting into the smaller things but also important to making the whole kit work smoothly. We have two kinds of storage here for the files. First, we have the SD card and this will go into the camera, of course. And we have a nice large one here, 128 gigabytes so that if we're on a trip, we can go a few nights before having to unload the pictures. Another crucial storage device is an external hard drive. And I'm picking a four terabyte external hard drive. Yes, it is a spinning disc and I know some are probably thinking I should recommend an SSD but you still get a lot more space today in 2022 for $100 if you go with a regular hard drive over a solid state drive. And having lots of storage space is pretty crucial for astrophotography processing because with calibration frames and all these files that we take, hundreds of raw files. And then when you stack, you need even more room for all the intermediate files that get created, like the calibrated files and the debaired and the registered so you just use a lot of space. So that's my recommendation. It's a four terabyte Western Digital Elements USB3 hard drive. It's about a hundred bucks. Another crucial accessory is the headlamp for where you're out in the dark and you need a hands-free light to see what you're doing. This one is by the company Coast. I got turned on to this model by Trevor Jones over on the Astro Backyard YouTube channel and this is the best headlamp I've ever used. It runs a long time on three AAA batteries that are in the back. It has separate switches for white light and red light. And then you can see that it's very adjustable in terms of where you're pointing the light. So it's just where you need it. Then we have the USB powered lens warmer. This is by Koowoo and it plugs right into an anchor battery pack. And what this does is it keeps your lens from fogging up, which will happen whenever there's enough humidity in the air. So if you ever see sort of dew or frost forming when you're out imaging, then you're really going to need to make sure your lens stays clear and this is the best way to do it is to warm your front lens element a little bit. This lens hood does prevent some dew from forming too, but if you're pointing straight up, for instance, then the lens warmer is really gonna be needed. And then next we have a 3D printed Bodnov mask. And this is a focusing aid. I'll show how to use it in this video. You might be able to get one of these printed up for free, like if your local library or if you have a friend that can give you access to a 3D printer. If not, you can just buy them. I got this one on eBay. For 135 millimeter focal length, you'll want a nice fine grid like this for it to work best. This one is a little bit of a tight fit. So I just put it on as gently as I can so then I can take it off quickly too. For flats calibration, it's handy to have some kind of LED panel. So here I have the Huion LED tracing panel and that can also power off the anchor battery pack that we used for the lens warmer. And last but not least, an intervalometer. And this is one of my favorites. This is the Pixel brand wireless intervalometer. So it has a little receiver and a transmitter or remote. And then the receiver just slots right into the hot shoe like that and plugs in. You program the sequence of exposures onto this little remote and hit start. It works really well. Okay, so that's it. That's all the pieces of this kit. And again, the grand total for everything here is right about $2,000 US today in March, 2022. Let's go ahead and get under the night sky and put this kit together and put it to use. Starting with the tripod. And again, you just need the tripod legs with a 3 eighth inch stud, but no tripod head installed. You can extend the legs, but you don't need to extend the center column. Actually, you shouldn't extend the center column because that would make your tripod a lot less stable than just keeping it not extended. Next up, we have the wedge or also called the latitude base. And the one that comes with the Star Adventure Pro Pack is fine. It's not the best out there, but it's good enough. And if you do want to upgrade it though, William Optics makes a nice upgraded equatorial wedge or latitude base. And this is how I keep my wedge stored for travel at the zero degree mark. That makes it most compact. What you can do is just loosen the big thing on the side and then turn this knob right here to set it for your latitude where you are. So I'm imaging at 42 degrees north of the equator. So I'm gonna set it to 42 and then tighten back up the lock here on the side. With that set, we can attach the wedge to the tripod just by twisting it on. You can see there's a 3 eighth inch hole in the bottom there, threaded hole. And you wanna make sure and twist it on nice and tight. Here I'm pointing at, there's a bubble level right there. And what you wanna do is level up the tripod using the tripod legs so that you're at least roughly leveled. It doesn't have to be perfect. Don't spend more than a couple of minutes on leveling, but you do want it sort of roughly leveled and you can just use the bubble level on this latitude base to do that. Next up, we have the actual tracker here, the Star Adventure Notice. I put a piece of Scotch tape over the dial. This is to prevent it from moving during travel and draining the batteries. Some people will take the batteries out, but I don't because it's a pain to put them back in. So I just tape the dial. And that works for keeping it in the off position. Doesn't accidentally go into star tracking like that. On the bottom of the Star Adventure, there is a short vixen dovetail plate here that comes with the kit. So you just wanna make sure to put that on before you leave and put it on nice and tight. There's a little safety screw that goes in the front there too. And then it just slides right onto the saddle on the latitude base and you tighten it up right here. At this point, I like to do a rough polar alignment, just sort of lining up Polaris with the tracker and naked eye, making sure I can see it in the Polar Scope. I'm not gonna really get it like completely aligned at this point, but just sort of doing a rough alignment. And the best time to do this is during Twilight because you can see Polaris naked eye, but before it's so dark that it gets hard to spot Polaris among all the other stars. So I like to do that during Twilight. Just get it roughly aligned like that. And now we're ready to put the declination bracket on. And I just have left my counterweight shaft and counterweight installed on the declination bracket. You can see, but you could also put the bracket on first and then add the shaft and counterweight. It's up to you. And so that just slides into the Vixen clamp on the Star Adventure like this, tighten that up. And one thing I can point out now is that this big plastic black ring here is the RA clutch. So the right ascension clutch. And so I can loosen that up. And you have to loosen that to balance and also to point the camera. And then you would tighten it back up, just finger tight before you start tracking. And then the declination bracket has two ways to move in declination. You have the slow motion control for declination, which is this knob here on the side. And then you also have a bigger black plastic ring below, which you have to loosen if you want to do big movements in declination, just like that's the actual declination clutch. And then finally, there's another little little knob in the center of the declination clutch, and that's for attaching your camera, which we can do right now. Okay, and then with the camera and lens on there, we can go ahead and balance. I'm not gonna bother balancing in deck or declination because it's a lightweight setup. I don't have anything to counterbalance the lens, but that's okay. We can try to get our best balance for right ascension, which is probably the more important one on a tracker. And to do that, I'll just loosen the RA clutch and then just see which side is heavy by seeing if the camera side or the counterweight side falls when I just sort of carefully let go, but I have my hand here as a safety. And it is the camera side. So that means we need to bring the counterweight down on the counterweight shaft a little bit. We'll do that and then check balance. And you can see balance is pretty good, good enough now. So we'll continue on. And the next thing is let's go ahead and get the camera and lens pointed roughly at Orion where we're gonna be imaging. And we'll also, once we get it pointed on Orion's belt, we'll focus with the bottom of mask. Okay, so to focus, I have turned on live view and I've lined up Orion's belt sort of centered on only talk, which is this bright star next to the horse head nebula. And now I'm gonna press the zoom in button on the camera to get closer in on only talk. And I'll center it up in my composition. And with the mask on the front of the camera lens, you can see it makes this pattern. Maybe it's a little hard to see, but what I'm doing is putting the central spike right in the middle of this X pattern by slowly moving the focus ring on the lens here. And I think I've nailed it. So I'm gonna take a short test exposure at high soda check. And then once that's done, we'll zoom in in playback mode and yeah, that looks very good. So you can see this is what it should look like when you're in focus with the bottom of mask on a bright star. That central spike is well centered in the X pattern. So now we have to remember, take the bottom of mask back off, very important to remember that because we have this cutout in the declination bracket, we can pull our line with everything are pretty much ready to go. I don't use the included illuminator, which is a little snap on thing that goes in here because I find it too fiddly. So I just mostly try to pull our line in the twilight hour, which makes it easy. You don't really need a red illuminator. But also sometimes use my headlamp, shining it just a bit off angle to illuminate the reticule if I need. And I do use a Polar Alignment app to show me based on the current time and location where Polaris should be in the circle on the reticule. So if I look at this app, this is Polar Finder Pro on Android. You can also use PSAlign Pro on iOS. It does the same thing. I can see that 140 on the clock is where Polaris should be right now. So then what I do is I just ignore the numbers. When I'm looking at the reticule, I just visualize where Polaris should be on that circle. And that's all you need to do. According to the app, it should be at 140. So I'm gonna put Polaris in that circle at as close to 140 as I can. I find that easy enough. It works well for me at this focal length and taking fairly short exposures. I usually just do 30 second sub exposures and that gets a pretty good exposure level if I use something like ISO 1600. So that's good enough for me. So okay, so we have Polar Alignment all set. Last thing we're gonna do here is just fine tune the composition. Again, we'll turn on live view and just make sure it all is centered upright. And then we can turn on the star tracking, sidereal tracking, and we're ready to start taking pictures. For this session, I did do 30 second exposures at ISO 1600 from a Bordel 4 sky. And I set the lens aperture to F2.8 by turning the aperture ring on the lens. Once you're done taking photos of the night sky, and I always recommend just get as many as you can, it's time to do calibration frames. And instead of showing this, I'm just gonna put up a big text summary here because I feel that whenever I try to explain, I somehow lose track of things or miss things. So I just wanna make sure I get all the information up here for calibration frames and how to take them. And I'll just leave that up here for a little bit so you can absorb all of this. But basically, darks are taken by putting the lens cap on, keeping all the settings the same as your pictures of the night sky. And including the timing. So if we took 30 second exposures of the night sky, we're gonna take 30 second darks, and you wanna do that on the field with the temperature the same as the lights or as the pictures of the night sky, whatever you wanna call them. And then bias frames are just everything the same as the darks except the exposure time. You're gonna make the exposure time as short as possible. So on the Nikon D5300, that's one fourth thousands of a second. And then flats, these are the ones that screw people up the most. They're taken with something like an iPad or a screen or the sky, something that is bright and evenly illuminated. I'm gonna go into a bit more detail on flats here and taking flats with an LED panel, in this case a tracing panel, because it can work well, but it has some quirks that I've discovered that could, and those quirks can be disastrous if you're not careful. If you're taking flats with any kind of screen or LED panel and your exposure is faster than about one 50th, one 60th of a second, you may run into this scenario where your first flat looks perfect, you know, a nice tight histogram here, like just past 50%, that looks like a perfect flat. So then you think, okay, everything's good, you take your flats and it's not till after you calibrate and stack that you realize there's an issue. So let's take the next flat to see what that issue is. And here you can see it, the histogram is all messed up and the reason is, is because there's this big black bar at the top of the frame. That is banding, horizontal banding from the refresh cycle of the power supply that's powering these LEDs. And if your exposure is fast enough, you'll catch these bands every so often, maybe every other flat, maybe every three flats, it depends on how fast your exposure is. But if you leave those banded flats in the stack, you're gonna get big problems. So my suggested solution is, don't change the aperture or the ISO, keep those where they were for the lights, but add diffusion so that you can take a longer flat. And the classic diffusion is a couple layers of white t-shirt. If you don't have that around, you can also use a big stack of white printer paper. There's all kinds of different diffusions, but the main thing is I found that if you can get your flat exposure on a DSLR to around 1 1⁄40 of a second or longer, you're gonna avoid this banding from panels. And the reason it works is because the exposure is long enough that you can't really freeze the motion, I think of that power cycling. Or another way to put it is it just gets sort of blended into the exposure because it's going so fast. And your exposure is long enough that you don't freeze it. So anyways, diffusion makes it so that you can take a longer flat exposure and that's the goal so that you don't get banding in your flats. You want a histogram that's just nice, tight peak around 50% to 70% over from the left. Okay, we're now on a Windows 10 PC. And here is all of my data that I've downloaded from the SD card and organized into four folders, biases, darks, flats and lights. And it has to be this exact naming for the next tool that we're gonna use, which is CRL, S-I-R-I-L. Just to show you, here's all of the bias frames, about 50 or so. There's my darks, again, about 50. There's my flats. I think I only did 20 here. You can see they all look very uniform though. And here's my lights, the actual pictures of Orion. And you can see, I think I took 220 of these. Okay, so I have this all organized. They're all in a folder on the desktop called Orion. And now we can move to CRL. Now, actually, before I show you that, let me just bring it up here in the browser just to show you the website. So it's S-I-R-I-L.org. And to download it, you just click on whichever operating system you use. So Windows, Mac or Linux. And it will download an installer. They're on version 1.0 now, which is the newest stable version, works really well. So let's go ahead and open that up. There we go. CRL 1.0.0. And the first thing that we're gonna do is click on this little home icon up here and tell it that we want our home folder to be the Ryan folder on the desktop. Click open. And then we are going to go to Scripps and we're gonna do one shot color, OSC underscore pre-processing. Don't do this one with Drizzle. Just do this normal OSC underscore pre-processing. It says you're about to use Scripps. Automatic Scripps are easy, blah, blah, blah. You can get more control without Scripps. Okay, I'm gonna say don't show that dialog again and click Run Scripps. And we're off to the races. So it's really that easy with these Scripps. It will do all of the calibration for you, making a master bias, making a master dark, making a master flat, calibrating all of your light frames, all of your actual files, frame pictures of the night sky automatically. And it then debares your light frames. That's what's to make them actual color images. It then registers all of your light frames together so it aligns them all based on the star patterns. And it finally, it stacks your light frames, meaning averaging the pixel values, which is the actual process to raise the signal to noise ratio and get you this final, really nice stacked picture. So we'll let this go. I am currently running this on a powerful PC that I built basically just for astro-processing. So it's going to go really fast on my machine here. But if you're working on a slower computer, like a laptop or something, expect this to take much, much longer. It really just depends on the speed of your processor and how many cores you can throw at it and stuff like that. So this is going quite fast. It's already on the registration phase. It's already done all the calibration. But with a laptop and when I was doing, you know, lots of frames, it would usually take hours to finish this whole pre-processing stage here. So it really just depends. But we'll let this go. And when it's all done with this, we should have a final image that we can continue to process. Wow, this computer really is really fast. Total execution time, four minutes to do the whole pre-processing of 220 lights with full calibration. To give you some perspective on my Windows laptop, I think that would take several hours. So, okay, so next you can see it finished, but we don't see anything. That's because we have to now open. So open button in the upper left-hand corner are resulting picture, so result.fit. And over here, you can see it says monochrome preview, but we do see three channels. So three channels means this is a full color image, R, G and B are the three channels. It's a 32-bit floating point image. And the monochrome preview, I don't know why it doesn't, can't show a full color preview, but that's just how it is. And we'll go ahead and click open. And then you might be confused, because even when it opens, you see it in black and white. And it doesn't look that good. It might look worse than just a single picture you took. So what's going on here? Well, it hasn't been stretched yet. This is a linear view, and we're also only looking at the red channel. So this is a monochrome view because we're only looking at one of the color channels. So you can see you can switch between the color channels here, or you can get an RGB preview right there by clicking RGB. So now you can see it is in full color. The controls are a little tricky. You, to zoom in, you need to hold down the control key on your keyboard and use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom in or out. And then still holding down control if you can click and drag around the image. So right now it's in this linear state meaning all the data is bunched up. This is what actually raw data looks like to a computer. But usually even when you take raw pictures and open them up in something like Adobe, it stretches them for you. So you're not used to seeing pictures like this. But anyways, if we go down here, you can see right there, it says we're in a linear view in this little button right down here. So let's change it to auto stretch view. Okay, so now we can see a lot more, but why does the picture look green? Well, that's a fairly normal thing with the SLR or one-shot color data. It's just this picks up, you know, all the sky glow and light pollution and there's way more green pixels. So your, your picture, it's very green. But we can now see the horse head here. Let me zoom in on it. There's the horse head and the flame. And there's Orion and the running man. And I want to point out this, this big thing down here only for visualization. So this is a really cool tool. It's really meant for astronomical imaging because we can, this is just a preview. We can turn things off and on and it hasn't actually permanently done anything to our data. It's just a previewing and auto stretch. You can also preview an arc sign stretch, which actually looks even better. Or preview a histogram stretch, which is showing you, you know, if you really just stretched it out to its extremes. So, you know, Orion gets completely blown away there. This is what it would look like. So, let's see, there's different options here. Okay, so anyways, let's go back to, well, I mean, we might as well try them all just to see what they all look like here. Okay. So I think the best looking one is the arc sign stretch. So let's keep it on that. And the next thing that I want to do is subtract out what's called the background gradient. So you can see that down here is, it's brighter than up in this corner. And this was really evident in the auto stretch or the really, really evident in the histogram stretch. You can see that's a light pollution gradient there and a pretty extreme one. Anyways, so we want to even out the field. Okay, and I'm going to open up background extraction. I'm going to turn down the number of samples per line to 10. I'm going to turn up the tolerance because this is a pretty extreme gradient. So I'm going to turn it up to two. And, you know, criticism, you know, people often have my videos as well. How would I know what to set that to? And it's a good criticism, but the truth is a lot of my processing, I just, it's trial and error. So I'm skipping some of the trial and error in these videos just so they don't turn out to be anything super long. But basically I find that with this tolerance setting, I might have to turn it up if I'm seeing something this extreme, basically is the idea there. Okay, let's go ahead and click Generate. Generates a bunch of samples. Try to right-click or click on these samples. It's not going to work in the RGB mode. You have to click on blue, green or red. So I'm going to click on blue. Now if you right-click on a sample, it will delete it. So I'm just going to delete the samples that are on the nebulae or in the dust. Leave the rest. And I'm going to change this to Division for the correction and click Apply. Okay, let's see what that did. Click on the RGB tab and go back to Linear and then go back to Auto Stretch. Seemed to even it out pretty well. Let's try ArcSign. I think it looks pretty good. Okay, so let's close that. And next let's go to Image Processing and go down to Color Calibration, Color Calibration. And I'm going to put a little sample here. So just, oh, again, I always do that. Click on blue, draw out a little box. This is our sample of the background. Click Use Current Selection and let's neutralize that background. Let's look at the RGB again. Yeah, looks pretty good. Okay, I'll apply it. Oh, make a white reference selection. Okay, so let's just take the center of the trapezium there. Use Current Selection, Apply. Take a look. Looks good. Okay, so that's it. We basically just set a black point. That's the background reference and then set a white point. That's the white balance reference. You click that button, then you click that button and you can close it. And so now we have a neutralized background. It's a much flatter field and we've also neutralized the colors. And so what do we do next? Well, next we stretch. So actually stretch. So we've been playing around with these preview stretches. Whoa, that's interesting. Histogram stretch, looks interesting. Now with the auto stretch, you can see we have sort of a dark circle in the middle. That's interesting. Well, it's still looking pretty good and this is a very stretched image. So let's leave that alone. Arc sign stretch isn't really doing exactly what I thought it would, but anyways, let's switch it back to linear. Let's open up Image Processing and go down to Histogram Transformation. And I'm just gonna do a manual stretch here. So I'm gonna take this mid-tones slider and drag it over. Take the shadow slider. Ooh, drag that over a little bit, apply it. And one thing I like about working in serial is you can just keep hitting apply and it doesn't close the window. That's really nice for doing multiple stretches like this. Okay, apply it again. And I'm just doing this same thing over and over. I'm taking the mid-tones slider, moving it to the left, this middle slider. Take the shadow slider, moving that to the right and then applying. You can see the image is really coming alive now and I'm gonna stop there. We could bring it further than this, but that's looking pretty good. You can close this. And if you wanted to just do a very naturalistic kind of processing and only in serial, we could just finish it off in here with a crop and a turning it around. So the poor set is a little bit more naturally looking because right now it feels upside down to me. So let's turn it around first. Let's go to image processing, geometry, rotate. Is that a vertical mirror? Let's see. Yeah, no, that's not right. Geometry, rotation, let's do 180 apply. There we go, okay. And then if we wanted to crop here, because I can see there are some registration artifacts, like if we look down here, see that? That's a registration artifact on there. I don't really see one up there, but probably, oh yeah, over here we have a pretty bad one, see that? Okay, so if we wanna crop in serial, we can just click on the blue channel here, draw out a box, how we want it to be cropped, and then right click inside the box and click crop. Done. Okay, go back to RGB. Let's go ahead and try this remove green noise command. See what that does. Yeah, I like that. Just to show you the before and after with that one. That was before, that's after, so looks good. Okay, so I like what this is doing. I think we're on the right track here. Let's just look at some details. Yeah, this looks nice. I guess I should add if you were just working just in serial here and you wanted the reds to pop a little bit, you could. Go in here and choose pink, red, red, orange, and raise the saturation on those, and it works pretty well. I'm gonna save that for Photoshop though. And I think I'm done in serial, so we're gonna move on from here. We're gonna use StarNet and Photoshop to finish off the image, but you can see that just with serial, you can get pretty far along here in your processing. So I'm gonna go up here to the save command. No, sorry, not save. I'm gonna go to this one right next to save. Save the current image in a different name. And I'm gonna choose TIFF from here, and I'm gonna save it as a 16-bit TIFF. And this is important for two reasons. One, Photoshop or the next program we're gonna use like 16-bit, but also StarNet, which is really the next program we're gonna use also wants it to be a 16-bit TIFF. So make sure to change it there. Leave compression on none, embed the profile, and click save. Okay, I'm gonna minimize serial here. We can just check in our Orion folder, did it save the TIFF file? Yes it did, there it is. Okay, so, and we could have called this whatever we want, maybe I'll just rename it here. I'm gonna call it stars. Okay, now let's download StarNet, which is a neural network sort of process for removing the stars. If you just go to starnetastro.com, this is where you can download the current version. Go to the download tab, and we're gonna download the graphical user interface for Windows. Now, unfortunately, if you're on Mac or Linux, there is no graphical user interface. You're gonna have to use the command line tool. I have shown that in other videos, but since we're on Windows, let's use the new GUI. This is StarNet version two. It's supposed to work even better than StarNet version one. And so far in my testing, I have found that to be true. It leaves fewer artifacts in the starless image, which is very good. Okay, let's open that up, extract it. Sure, let's move it to the desktop and open it up. Click more info. If you get that, click run anyway. And here we go. So this is the StarNet GUI. Let me get rid of these. And we can just click browse for our input file. I'm gonna click into Orion, choose my stars file. I'm gonna rename the output file starless. And, oh, it has instructions right here. This is nice. Select input file by clicking browse button to just output file name, hit run and hope for the best. Okay, let's do it. And then it has a little console here. It tells you how far along it is. You can see, again, because I have a fast computer processor here, this is going pretty fast. If you're on a slower computer, you can expect this to maybe take, you know, half an hour at the most. For my computer, it'll probably take under a minute. Okay, it's done. So you can close out of that, let's check it. And there's our starless image. And you can see it did a pretty good job of removing the stars. It left maybe just a little bit of an artifact there around Alnitok and this star, I think that's a star, but it didn't mess up that reflection nebula there. Did a really nice job in Orion here. You can see all the dust. And if you're new to my channel, the reason that we do this step, as you'll see in a moment, it helps us bring out all of this crazy dust in the image when we combine it with this star's image. You can see that all that crazy dust is a little bit harder to see. By working with this starless image, we're gonna be able to bring out some of this stuff that we've captured a lot better. And I have had people, you know, comment, well, why would you wanna bring out this dust? And it's a, you know, it's a fair question. Some people don't wanna see all that brown dust. They maybe just wanna focus on the horse head. So this is an optional step. You don't have to do it, but if you just really wanna see everything that's there in your image, including all of the dust in Orion, this is a way to do it. Okay, so next up, let's open up Photoshop and click Open. Go to the desktop, Orion, and we're gonna open up both the starless and the star's image. Click Open. There we go. So I'm gonna take this star's image, press Control A to select all, Control C to copy everything, and then Control V to paste it as a layer on top of the starless. So, and then I'm just gonna rename these, I'll rename this one starless and rename this one stars. And then just to get a quick idea, and then just to get a quick idea of how this is gonna work with this star's image, right now it's just covering up the starless image, right? But if we change this from normal to a screen blend, now what's happening is it's basically brightening up the mid tones while not blowing out the highlights. So the stars didn't get any bigger, but it's bringing in all the mid tones from this layer below. It also does erase the darkest parts of the image quite a bit. So if we looked at a histogram, you can see there's now plenty of separation over here from the left edge. And so what I usually do next is I add a curves adjustment layer and just get rid of that separation. So it's resetting the black level, okay? But let's compare this now to just our star's image and you can see it did bring some life into the image, right? Because we get more of this sort of 3D feel with all this dust here. But it also has the downside of bringing out some of the inherent problems in the image. There's a weird unevenness where this central part looks darker and the edges look brighter. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it's in a flat tissue or I don't know what happened there, but we can fix that in Photoshop. So I'm going to add another curves adjustment layer. And with this one, I'm just going to be looking out here at the edge and I'm going to darken that edge stuff down like this. And you might think, oh, that's enough. You've added all this contrast, but my main goal here is actually to even this out. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add a mask to this curves layer. So you can see right now that curves layer is just applying to everything in the image. That's what this layer mask being a whole light means. But I want to add a circular gradient. So I'm going to go over here to my gradient tool. It's actually already on the circular gradient, but normally it starts out on linear gradient and you have to change it to radial. And I just want the most basic of gradients, which is black to white. We want the center to be black. That's where we don't want the curves not to apply. We want it to apply to everything out here. So I'm just going to draw out from the center almost. Let's try again, draw it from the center this way. There, okay. I think that looks pretty good. Now, I'm not sure if up here, I think that might be actual sort of bluish dust. It's hard to tell sometimes with Orion what is an issue and what is actual signal. I think that we went a little bit too far now with this part of the picture being too bright. So I'm just going to, let me just turn that off and on. Oh, no, it just didn't affect it at all. But now I see there's a little bit of a hotspot right there. So I'm just going to take a really soft brush and paint in white right there. Okay, so what I just did, let me show you too on the mask, is that. So now we've just basically painted in a very dim ring of black with this curve. But there's the effect. We've gotten rid of a lot of that weird unevenness in the field. Okay, what else is there to do? So one thing is Orion is getting a little blown out right there. So I'm actually going to duplicate this stars layer. That makes it look even worse at first. I'm going to put this on top. I'm going to change it to back to normal. And I'm going to add a layer mask. I'm going to make that layer mask black, meaning nothing in the image this layer is showing. So you can just do edit fill with black. Okay, so now we're back to this layer is doing nothing, right? But I'm going to call this Orion core repair. And I'm going to paint in white on Orion here with a nice soft brush sent to a lower opacity, maybe I'll do 50%. Okay, I'm going to make sure that I have the mask selected over here on the layers panel. Zoom in a little bit, control plus. And watch that, that was the first click before, after, before, after. And we can keep going. I'm just going to click a couple more times. Okay, and now let's look at the before and after of just what we did here. I'm going to turn the layer off and on. That's before, that's after, right? So we've recovered a lot of the highlight detail. And the way we did it again is just by duplicating the stars layer and then putting on a layer mask, filling it with black and then just putting in this white area that we want to show through. Okay, next thing I want to do is play around a little bit with color of the nebulae. And so I'm going to do that on the starless layer. So I'm going to click starless. I'm going to go to adjustments. I'm going to go to selective color. And you can see just by playing around here with the selective color, I can make sort of some of the reds pop. I'm just removing cyan from red. You can also add a little bit of magenta. Okay, before and after, you can just see it really helps make the horse head nebulae area pop. You can also try adding a saturation adjustment. Just adding a little bit of saturation to the starless. Here's the difference there. And if I want to just add a little bit of saturation maybe to the stars as well, let me try this. I'm going to do a select by color range. I'm just going to click on a few of the stars, holding down shift, do a little bit. Okay, and then let's increase the fuzziness a little bit. Let's see what this looks like. Yeah, it's looking pretty good. Click okay. Okay, you can see it selected most of the stars. Let's fuzzy up that selection a little bit. So we're going to go to select, modify, just expand it by two pixels and then let's feather it by two pixels. Now with all these stars selected and the feathering just makes it a slightly softer selection. Let's go to adjustments. I'm now back on the top layer. Click on saturation and let's increase the saturation. See, whoa, that's really cooking it. But it's interesting, it's like you really don't see a huge amount of change until you get to about 50 and then anything over 50 and it just goes insane. But if you really want to push saturation, I think maybe like plus 40 here looks pretty good. And then we can turn it off and on. It's subtle when you're zoomed out like this but let's zoom in and make sure it still looks good. Here's before and after, before, after. Okay, so yeah, it's pretty subtle but I can see a change at least. It's making the flame come alive a little bit and the star color is more evident. Okay, I think we're basically done. The only last thing here is there's a lot of weird stuff on this edge, so I'm going to crop that out. Okay, so let's go to the crop tool. I had it on 16 by nine before, that's sort of cool. We could do that but then we're cutting out M78 to the reflection nebula down there unless we just moved this crop box down. So that's a pretty cool crop but you can also just not have it set to a specific crop. We could just do ratio clear and you can set it to whatever you want. So that looks pretty good too. Maybe I'll try to put all-nitok right on that third line. This little bit of Barnard's loop is sort of distracting. I don't think that really adds much to the image. Get rid of that. Bring it in a little bit here too because there's a little bit of weirdness down there and I like having that bright star in that corner just sort of gives it a nice diagonal. Okay, let's hit enter. For some reason that didn't work, let's hit check. Okay, that cropped it. Okay, and I think we're done. I don't know if this looks exactly like the thumbnail, you know, the final image that I did before when I was making the thumbnail for the video but I think it looks pretty good and this was all done with just Cyril, S-I-R-I-L and Photoshop. You know, another program I use is Pixinsight. That's very powerful too but I think you can do a lot with just these two programs. If you ever have an issue with stacking in Cyril, if you're on Windows you can, you also have the option of a free program called Deep Sky Stacker so you could stack in here, then open your resulting TIFF file into Cyril to get all of these great image processing commands and then I like finishing off in Photoshop just so I can use a layers panel. So if you wanna try to make the image better, I'll share all this data. You can feel free to play around with it. Until next time, this has been Nico Carver from NebulaFotos.com. Clear skies.