 Hey, Vico Carver from nebulaphotos.com here. It's either really late at night or very early in the morning, depending on how you think about it. It's about 3 a.m., the witching hour. The reason I'm up at this hour is because I really want to capture this new comet that's in the morning sky for us in the Northern Hemisphere. It's called Comet Neo-Wise, and it has a really long tail. I've seen all these great photos of it online, and of course I want to take one myself. So I can't do it from my backyard here in Somerville, because there's too many trees, and this comet right now is only getting about 10 to 12 degrees above the horizon from here. And so I went into my backyard and I did this trick. This is about 10 degrees if you're measuring from the ground, and so I put the ground right here. I looked right here, and this whole area was taken up by trees. And so the comet would really just get above the tree line and wouldn't be a very good shot. So what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to travel just a little bit to get out to the ocean, because I'm actually very close to the ocean here, and try to shoot it over the ocean. It's predicted to be clear. I haven't actually been out since I woke up, but if everything works out, you'll be seeing this video, and hopefully I'll have the picture of the comet. I'm going to be doing this with a lightweight setup, because I don't want to have to, since I'm going to be traveling, and traveling to a new place for me, I don't want to bring too much stuff. So it's a setup that I can lift with one hand. It's the Skywatcher Star Adventurer, a ball head, my Canon 5D Mark III, and the Rokinon 135 F2. And I think this will provide a good field of view for the comet, a full frame with the 135 millimeter focal length. So we'll see. This is a very popular Star Tracker. It works very well, very reliable. So I have no worries about using this. I don't think the exposures are going to be very long, but the reason I'm using a Star Tracker is because I want to be able to do something like 10 second exposure so I can really capture the comet's tail. And with a 135 millimeter lens, if you go up to 10 seconds, you're going to get streak stars if you're not tracking. So that's why I have the Star Tracker. But the comet is definitely captureable without a Star Tracker if you don't have one. So if you don't have one, don't worry about it. Just take your camera out. Try to shoot the comet, because it is really pretty bright, especially for us here in the Northern Hemisphere where we haven't had anything but pretty dim comets for quite a while. So let's get in the car, get out there, and we'll see what we can see. Hopefully no clouds. OK, I did capture a comet neo-wise. Sorry I didn't show the setup, but I was rushing to get this setup in time because the sun was rising very quickly when I arrived. And I just got off my shots before it got too bright. I was ramping down from three seconds to two seconds to one second exposures because the sky was brightening so much that I wasn't getting any contrast with the comet. But I can see in my live view that I got at least 15 or 20 shots with the tail. And so hopefully when I stack those, the tail really comes out. And it's a beautiful scene here. We're in Marblehead, Massachusetts with the light host and the boats. So again, I was using the Skywatcher Star Adventurer, my Canon 5D with the 1.35mm lens. And the reason I picked this location is because looking over the ocean, I have really good horizons for the comet. I'll zoom in here on my live view screen to show you what it looks like, just a single exposure. And then we'll get back to the house and stack them together and composite it with the landscape here that I took shots of as well to make the full picture. OK, here's what a single exposure looked like on the back of the camera. And you can clearly see the tail right there going straight up. What I am hoping is that this faint stuff in the tail really comes out and stacking, even though these pictures are pretty bright and there's not much contrast, hopefully by stacking them together using the nucleus of the comet as the registration point, I can bring out a little bit more detail. But I'm going to pack up and head home. OK, so I tried stacking, but it didn't really work out that well because due to this really aggressive sky gradient and just the fact that there wasn't much contrast, there were very, very short exposures at one to two seconds. And just I only got off like 20 of them. The stacking just really didn't do me any favors and was very hard to then combine any result I got from stacking with the foreground. So instead, what I did for this picture is I just picked the best one here, the one where it looked the most in focus and everything looked good. And I'll just show you how I process just this single exposure. Hopefully, Comet Neowise does stick around and I can do something maybe with my Astrotex 60ED at 360 millimeters focal length and really get in there on the comet and its tail and do some comet stacking and all of that. And I can make a different video for that more involved process. But I just wanted to show you how I went around about editing this sort of astro snapshot, just a single frame. It's pretty simple. All I did was I wanted a little bit more contrast. I wanted to bring out the foreground a little bit, but then also darken the sky so that there's more contrast with the comet and the stars. So first thing I did was I'm just going to add a new curves layer, curves adjustment layer, just by clicking on this button up here over here on the right. And I just want to darken the whole picture a little bit first, so I'm just going to grab the shadow point, the black point, and bring it over until I like how this looks with the comet and the stars. And I like how that looks with the comet and the stars, but down here in the sunrise part, I don't like how dark it gets along the horizon because it looks sort of unnatural. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to click on the adjustment layer's mask. Whenever you add an adjustment layer, it comes with a layer mask already included. I'm just going to grab my gradient tool here and draw a gradient directly on the mask. And the way I'm going to draw this gradient is I don't I like how this part of the picture looks, so I want that to stay white, meaning it's going to do the full effect of the curves on the top part of the picture, but then I want it to gradually affect the bottom part of the picture less. So I'm going to click up here in the part where I want it to stay white. And then I'm going to draw down like that. Now that I'm seeing it, I think that I can add even a little bit more contrast in. So I'm just going to drag that shadow slider over even a little bit more like this. OK, so I'm happy with that. The only other thing that I really want to do is just bring out this part of the picture a little bit because it's so dark that there's not much of interest in just having a black corner like this. So the way I'm going to do that is I'm just going to duplicate the background layer by pressing Command J on Mac or be Control J on Windows and bring that above everything else. So this is back to the original picture. And I want to go ahead and add a layer mask to this layer. So I'll just do that by clicking the Layer Mask button down here. And if I fill that layer mask with black, so if I just do Edit Fill with black, you can see then this layer has no effect. I want just this part of the picture to have an effect. So I'm going to go ahead and use that gradient tool again on this layer mask and just draw a little gradient into the corner like that. And then I'm just going to brighten up that corner by adding a Curves. So I'm just going to press Command M. And I'm just going to bring out those boats a little bit like that. So that was before and that's after. So it makes a pretty subtle difference, but it just adds a little bit more of interest to that corner. And I might play around with that gradient a little bit until I thought that looks right. OK, there we go. So you can see it's just brought in a little bit of a lightening effect on that corner. Of course, since this is on its own layer, this change, I can always play around with the opacity of that layer until it's just how I want it. All right, so here is my final picture. I'm just going to go ahead and press F twice. And that's my astrosnap shot of Comet Neowise over the North Atlantic Ocean in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Hope you enjoyed this quick video for me. I just wanted to get something out there to encourage people to go shoot this Comet no matter what kind of equipment that you have. Again, if the Comet does stick around and we're able to shoot it in the early evening, starting next week, I'm going to definitely shoot this again at a higher focal length. I'm planning around 300 to 400 millimeters. Till next time, this was Nico Carver from NebulaFotos.com.