 It's a beautiful night here in New Hampshire and I'm gonna show you how to photograph the stars with this simple setup of just a tripod, a camera with a remote shutter and a wide angle lens. And instead of just taking one photograph of the stars, we're gonna actually take hundreds all in a row because then when we get onto the computer, we can turn this series of photos into three different final products. A star trails photo, a single photo edited to highlight a constellation and a video time lapse of the stars. And we'll do it with completely free software. So if you're a photographer who's been always curious about getting under the night sky and shooting the stars, I think this is gonna be the perfect video to get you started. So the first step is picking out the gear that you're going to use and for the camera, I would just suggest using whatever you have available. It can be a DSLR, it can be a mirrorless camera, it could be a point and shoot. Anything that you can do a wide angle fast lens with. And I do have other videos even that I'll link to in the description about how to do this even with your iPhone or Android smartphone. For the lens, if you can have a pick of lenses, I would pick your widest and fastest lens. I'm gonna be using this Seven Artisans 10 millimeter F2.8. It was sent to me for free by Seven Artisans to try out, but they aren't sponsoring this video. This video does have a sponsor, which is Atlas Coffee Club, and I'll tell you more about them in a few minutes. But back to the lens, the wide angle is good for shooting the night sky because it allows you to capture full constellations and the landscape all at once. In terms of a tripod, whatever tripod you normally use is probably just fine. I like the brand Monfrotto, and I usually buy my Monfrotto tripods used because they really hold up for years and years. There are a couple of accessories I do recommend. The first one is probably the most important and it only costs about $10. It's a remote shutter release cable and you just plug it into your camera and then if you actually lock this shutter button like this and set your camera to continuous shooting, it will just keep taking pictures until you unlock it and stop it. And that's exactly what we want to do tonight. So this is super useful. If your camera does have an internal interval timer in the menu, then you don't even need this. But unfortunately, my camera doesn't have that option. So this will work just as well. The second accessory is a lens warmer. And the reason you might need this is if the air is humid, the lens can get fogged up from condensation. And this can easily happen even in the winter. It just depends on the dew point. But if you have one of these lens warmers that you can wrap around the lens, then the front element will stay clear and not get fogged up. And this little thing is powered by a USB battery pack. So I'll link to this. You can just buy it on Amazon. It's very handy. So the next thing is location and timing. And this is very important because the darker the sky, the better your photos of the stars will come out. Both human-made light pollution from artificial lighting and natural sources of light pollution like the full moon, both of those things will wash out the sky and also create color casts on your photos that you might not want. So you can practice when those things are happening, like in the full moon, and you can practice under the city lights just to get used to your camera and used to focusing on the stars. But when you actually want to take a nice photo of the stars, I'd recommend finding a darker spot to take your photos. And also doing it when the moon is not up in the sky. And those times are like during the new moon period or just when the moon is below your local horizon like after it's set or before it's risen. A great resource for finding a dark location near you is lightpollutionmap.info and you can search on that map for cooler colors to find dark spots. If you find a good public park, call ahead. Most park departments or police departments are pretty accommodating and it's good to let them know that you're coming at night. So now let's turn to setting up the camera for shooting the stars. Normally I suggest shooting in raw file format because it gives you more flexibility in editing. But for this video to keep it more simple and easy, I'm just gonna do JPEG. But I do want to choose the highest quality JPEG here. Okay. And then for the ISO, I'm gonna turn mine up to 6400. I would suggest a fairly high ISO but not into this like five digit territory. Somewhere around 3200 to 6400 is good for what we're doing tonight. And then for shutter speed, it will depend on your focal length. But if you're using a wide angle lens like I am, I'm using a 10 millimeter lens, somewhere around eight to 10 seconds will do well. If you're using something more like a 50 millimeter lens, you might want to knock that down to just three or four seconds. Okay. And then for the aperture setting, I think I already said I want it wide open, meaning the smallest F number. So for this seven artisans lens, that's F2.8. For the white balance, I want to turn it off of auto white balance to daylight white balance. This is going to give you the most accurate star colors. Of course, you can choose other kinds of white balances if you prefer like a more fantasy look, but I want a more true color look. And then lastly, we want to change the shooting mode from single shooting to continuous shooting. And this is what's going to allow us to use that shutter release cable in the locked position to continue taking photos one after another. So during the summer months in the Northern Hemisphere, we can shoot the Milky Way core and Sagittarius, but right now it's winter, as you can see. So I'm going to center the most famous constellation in the winter here in the Northern Hemisphere, Orion the Hunter. And it's very easy to spot. It's usually to the south and it's easy to spot because of Orion's belt, those three bright stars. If you have some trees in your foreground or snow or something like that, that can look nice. In order to focus, we are going to want to use the digital zoom feature in live view if you're using a DSLR. If you're using muralists, it should just right away be in live view, but press that zoom in button until you're as close to the stars as you can get. And then start at infinity on your focus ring and then start backing off and you're trying to make the stars as small as possible. Once you think you've got that point, take a test shot, go into playback mode and really zoom in to look at the stars. If you're in focus, the stars will be bright and there will be many little stars visible. If you're out of focus, your stars will take on sort of a donut appearance and only the brightest stars in the sky will be visible. So if your test photo looks like the one on the left, keep trying until it looks more like the one on the right. All right, that's it. Now we're ready to start taking photos. So I'm just going to press in on the shutter release and put it into the lock position and we'll let it go for at least an hour, really the longer the better and then we're done. And so now you can either stay out and do some stargazing or pack up for the night. But if you do plan to stay out, it's always nice to bring a thermos of hot coffee, especially on a cold night like tonight. And this brings me to the sponsor for this video, Atlas Coffee Club, which is a coffee subscription that brings you this amazing variety of single origin coffees from all over the world. Since I've subscribed, I've had coffees from India, Ethiopia, Ecuador, and they've all been delicious and delivered right to my door with a cool postcard and information about the coffee. They're roasted to order. And so the coffee comes very fresh and you can tailor it to your preferences and needs, like how you want your coffee roasted. I like my coffee roasted medium and how much you drink. I drink a lot of coffee. So whether you need coffee for those trips to the dark site or for the next morning after staying up all night, I think you'll really enjoy Atlas Coffee Club. And of course I have a special offer for you if you go to atlascoffeeclub.com slash Nebula Photos and use my code Nebula Photos at checkout, you'll get 50% off your first bag of Atlas Coffee. Okay, now we're on the computer and the first thing I'm gonna show you how to do is make a star trails photo and this will work on any Mac or Windows computer. You're just going to transfer your files off of your camera onto the computer. I just used an SD card reader and already did this, transferring all of my JPEGs that I shot into this folder that I made called Night Sky Photos. And so you can see this is just a long list of about 400 JPEGs. And if we just look at one, it looks like this. The next thing we're gonna do is download and install Marcus Enzwiler's Starstacks and it is completely free to download and free to use. And it works on any modern version of Windows or Mac OS. So I'm gonna be showing it here on Mac OS but it works the exact same way on Windows. And I'll put this link to download it in the video description. So after you've installed that program, go ahead and open it up and it should look like this and then just open up your folder of images and select all the images in the folder by pressing Command A on Mac or Control A on Windows and drop them where it says drop images here. And then this interface allows you to zoom in on the pictures or pick a different picture to look at. So if you want to, you can step through here and oh, I can see I have some clouds there. We'll see how that turns out. But you can look at the different pictures in your list here if you want. And then over here are the preferences. For now, I would just suggest leaving the preferences on their defaults, which should be gap filling. If it does not say gap filling there under blending mode, go ahead and change it to a gap filling. That just means it's gonna fill in the lines if there's any little gaps in between the pictures when your picture was saving to the camera and then taking the next one. We'll talk about some of these other options when we get to the time lapse section of this tutorial. But for now, we can go ahead and just start processing. And the button to do that is this fourth button up here over from the left. And if you hover over it, it says start processing. So go ahead and just click that. And then you'll see it start working through your list of images here. And as it's going through the list, it will actually be creating the final image right here in the middle. So you can actually watch it work, which is sort of fun. But this is gonna take a while. So I'm gonna speed up this part of the video. Okay, and we're done. It says blending done down here in the lower left. And you can see we have a really nice star trails image here now. I did make a little mistake in that I got into the image with my red head flashlight. And I might wanna fix that up, but other than that looks really good. And we'll go ahead and save this. So you can just go up here to the third button over from the left. And it's the save as button. And the way this works is you can save it wherever you want. I'm just gonna save under the desktop and call this star trails. You can see the default is .jpeg. But if I switch that to a different format like PNG or TIFF, it will save in that format. So I'm gonna do star trails .tiff and save to the desktop. And then I'm gonna open that TIFF file with the GNU image manipulation program. You're of course free to open this with whatever photo editor you like, Photoshop or Affinity Photo or whatever. But the GNU image manipulation program is free. And in here, if I just wanted to get rid of that little mistake with my headlamp, I could just probably most easily just crop the image just a little bit like that. Pretty easy. And what else can I do? I can increase the saturation on the image. So if we go to colors, saturation and just increase the scale on the saturation, you can see the stars get even more colorful. Okay. And you can see there's a nice variety of all the different star colors in there from the bright hot blue stars to the cooler yellow and orange stars and the white stars in between. And so I think this looks really nice. I'm just gonna leave it like this and go ahead and export it as a JPEG. Okay. So there's option number one, star trails. Pretty easy, right? You just need to get the photos onto your computer, open them up in star stacks with the default options and stack them. And then if you want, you can do a little saturation boost and crop in your favorite photo editor. Next up, let's go back to the GNU Image Manipulation program and go file open. And I'm just going to pick the first JPEG in my list here. So we're just gonna edit a single photo for this method. And in this method, what I wanna do is highlight the Orion constellation. Cause I think it gets a little bit lost in all the stars in this photo, but we'll make it a little bit more prominent by adding lines and a little bit of glow to the stars and even label it Orion. So first thing I'm gonna do is I don't want this selection outline on. So I'm gonna go to view and turn off show layer boundary. You can zoom in and out with plus and minus in the GNU Image Manipulation program. And then over here, this is called the layers panel. And I'm gonna go ahead and add a couple additional layers that we'll use. The first layer I'm gonna add, I'm just going to duplicate this existing layer. So I'll right click and choose duplicate layer and I'll double click on that and call this stars. I'm gonna double click on the bottom layer and call that base. And then I'm gonna create one additional layer on top just by clicking the new layer button down here and we'll call that lines. Okay. And then I'll go ahead and turn off lines and stars for now and just click on my base layer. And I'm gonna go to colors, curves and I'm just going to brighten this layer up until we can see the snow in the foreground and see the sky a little bit better. Something like that. So just grab the curve line and raise it up a little bit. Okay, then I'm gonna turn on my stars layer and I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm gonna go back to colors, curves. This time though, I'm gonna pick a point more in the middle and I'm gonna raise it way, way up and I'm gonna do the same thing with saturation. I'm gonna raise that scale way, way up until it looks a little bit weird because what I wanna do is emphasize some stars in Orion and I wanna give them their nice, beautiful color. So you can see here, Beetlejuice is this nice sort of orangish red color and Rigel down here is a nice blue color and so forth. But I don't wanna bring up all of this color noise in the background. I just wanna put this effect onto the stars. So we're gonna add a layer mask. So right click on the stars layer, click on add layer mask and where it says initialize layer mask to choose black. Okay, and then I'm going to paint directly onto that layer mask. So make sure the mask is selected over here in your latest panel. Grab your brush tool, make sure the foreground color is white and then you are going to go ahead and adjust the size until it's a little bit bigger than each star and go ahead and center this cursor right on the stars and then click on each star that you want to emphasize. Or you can sometimes do a double click to even get a bigger effect. And I'm mostly just concerned with the stars in Orion but if you wanted to do this on all the bright stars you could and if you can't see quite what I'm doing, the effect, let me go ahead and turn that layer off. Let me zoom in a little bit just to show you that one more time. Here's it off and here's it back on. And you can see it just made the stars that we want to emphasize in the constellation a little bit brighter and more colorful. Okay, now go ahead and turn on your lines layer and switch to that and we're going to grab the path tool. The keyboard shortcut for that is B and what I'm going to do with this is just draw in some lines between the bright stars in the constellation. So let me zoom in again a little bit and this is the head of Orion right here. So I'm going to click and then click over here to draw in a path. Now this is just a path. What I have to actually do to make it appear as a line is choose the stroke path button over here. And I found anywhere from like four to six pixels works well for the line width. For the color, it's going to use the foreground color which again is white. So we'll click on stroke and click away from that tool and now you can see what it did there. It made a nice solid white line between those two stars and then I can just repeat that process throughout the constellation. So I'm going to go here from this head of Orion to the right shoulder over here and again stroke that path. Click away from that tool, click back in and keep going like this. And this is a little bit boring so I'm going to speed up this part of the video. Okay, and now I'm done putting in those lines with the path tool. We can zoom back out a little bit to see how that looks, looks good. Now it's a little bit boring though. What I want to do is add an effect to those lines and make them glow. And so to do that, make sure you're on the lines layer, go up here to filters, go down to light and shadow and then down to drop shadow. And with this dialogue open, go ahead and first change the color so we can see what we're doing from black to whatever color you'd like. But I sort of like an aqua for this kind of thing. So I'm going to choose this color right in between solid blue and solid green. Click okay. And you can see by default the drop shadow will be offset to change it so that it's glowing right around the lines. We want to change these offsets right here from 2020 to 00. So just double click on one, type in zero, press enter, and they should both change to zero. Now that looks pretty good but the glow is a little bit subtle so I'm going to increase first the glow radius to tens a little big. Let's do seven. And then I'll increase the blur radius to around 15. And I'm going to bring down the opacity just a little bit. All right, I think that looks good. So now I just want to save this as a preset. So I'm going to click on this little plus button next to presets and call it blue glow. And click okay. Now all I have to do the last step here is I'm just going to label this Orion and also give my text a blue glow. So I'm going to choose my text tool here. I'm going to use Avenir light for the font and I'm going to do a size of 150 pixels. This might be different depending on the size of your image. Put in my text and move it to where I want. I usually like putting the text close to the constellation but a little bit off to the right. And that looks good but now let's just give it that glow. So we'll go back into filters, light and shadow, drop shadow and it resets back to the defaults but under our presets we already defined a blue glow. So we'll just choose that and click okay. All right, and that's it. So I think that that looks really nice showing off the Orion constellation with these lines and a label. And so now I can just go ahead and export that as a JPEG to save it. I'll export it to the desktop and call it constellation Orion dot JPEG. Click export. So there's our second product from this night. This is just again a single shot that we edited and added some nice constellation lines and a label to. Okay, we're now on to our final project which is time lapse. And for this go ahead and open back up star stacks and we can use this same list of files. Click into this little top button on the far right which is the preferences. And we can leave the blending mode to gap filling. This time I'm gonna turn on comment mode because I think that looks good with time lapse and we can increase the length of the trails here. And this is very important for time lapse. We're gonna turn on this cumulative image saving. So save after each step because that's how we're gonna actually get the images to turn into our time lapse that will show the star trails. I mean, there's other ways to do time lapse too. We could just use all of these images on their own. Maybe I'll show you what that will look like but for this I'm gonna use this cumulative image saving function here. And I want to put all these files into their own folder. So I'm going to click on browse and make a new folder on the desktop for this and I'll just call it time lapse. Let's start the image numbering at one. And that's it. We can now go ahead and click the start processing button which again is the fourth button over here from the left in the upper left corner. And just like last time I'll speed up this process but it will go through each image in the list and it's gonna take a little bit longer this time because it's saving each one to this folder as it's going as well. Okay, it's done making our sequence of images for the time lapse and this is again to sort of make this cool comet mode time lapse. There's other kinds of time lapses we could make with this same sequence of images but let's just go ahead and create the time lapse now. And for this on Mac I'm going to use QuickTimePlayer which is free and comes with the operating system but then in a second I'll show you how to do it on Windows with another piece of free software called VirtualDub. So on Mac just open up QuickTimePlayer, go to file, open image sequence, go here into your time lapse folder or actually just click on your time lapse folder and then click choose media and then it will give you some options here if you want a shorter time lapse that goes faster choose more frames per second if you want a longer time lapse choose fewer frames per second. I'll choose 24 frames per second. You can just leave it on this greater compatibility H.264 if you want to save it in a particular format you can or you can just leave it on actual size just click open and then it will go through this preparing video. Okay, and that took a few minutes with 400 frames at 24 frames per second it's a 17 second long video time lapse and it looks really nice I think. You can see what the comet mode did there it sort of gives the stars like a little bit of a comet shape where the trails sort of diminish as they go out. And again if you wanted this to go by faster you can just choose more frames per second. And now I'm going to switch over to Windows to show you how to assemble the time lapse over there. Okay, I'm over here on Windows and we are going to use a free program called virtual dub that's at virtualdub.sourceforge.net and just download it and you'll get a zip file unzip it and inside there will be this folder and inside that folder there will be the application virtual dub you don't have to like install it in the applications folder you can put it wherever you want just double click it to open it and make sure that you also have your time lapse that we created your time lapse folder with all these pictures that we created in star stacks and then in virtual dub here just go to the file menu choose open video file and navigate to your time lapse folder with all the pictures click on the first picture and click open and what you should see is that down here at the bottom are all of the frames so like I said, I have about 400 frames and if I go through them here you can see it does create a cool time lapse but there's a few options that we wanna set those options are under video, the video menu just go up to video, choose filters click add and you can resize it there's a resize filter if you wanna make it smaller cause otherwise this is gonna take a while I think to save so I'm gonna resize mine to 1920 by 1280 okay under that same video menu there's frame rate and the default it looks like is 10 frames per second but we can put in anything we want so for this one I'm gonna do 60 frames per second I want a little faster animation so go ahead and click okay and that's it so now we can do save as AVI under the file menu I'm gonna save it back to the desktop and we'll call it star trails and there it goes so now it's processing the animation and I'll speed this up like I have been to show you the final result okay now it's done and I can go ahead and preview it here and it did work just fine this is the 60 frames per second version so it's a lot faster than before but you could play around maybe try 30 frames per second whatever you like but this is the basic idea is work in virtual dub to get a free time-lapse editor right here in Windows you're now seeing the names of everyone who supports this YouTube channel over on patreon.com slash nebula photos it's an excellent community of dedicated amateur astrophotographers just people who want to learn and are very willing to share their own expertise we have over 800 members now there's an active discord that you can get involved in and I can't thank my patreon members enough because I'm now doing this full time thanks to all of you and it is what has allowed me to make these videos and to really pursue this as my own business so thank you so much to all my current patreon members and if you enjoy this channel I think you will get a lot of benefit out of joining my patreon community it starts at just one dollar a month and for that you get a bunch of perks including direct messaging support with me a monthly zoom chat with the whole community a monthly imaging challenge organized on discord where we pick different targets every month and a whole lot more so if you're interested head over to patreon.com slash nebula photos till next time this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies