 Hi there, Nico Carver here. For this 5 minute Friday I'm going to chat about some of the most disappointing astrophotography projects, the ones that really failed in my eyes for one reason or another. And thinking about this video I started thinking conceptually about sort of the different stages of an astrophotography project. So for me it always starts with the idea and then I pre-visualize what that idea will look like as a finished photo and then I come up with a plan for how to capture and process to get me to that final image that I have in my mind. And I realize when thinking about this that you know I'm a pretty okay processor so really most of my failures don't come in the processing stage but either in that visualization stage where sometimes my vision is just really out of whack with reality or sometimes it's a flaw in my actual capture be it poor planning or the wrong gear for the job or something else. So let's go through a few examples here and I'll talk through what I think went wrong, what I learned from each failed astrophoto. This first one is my most recent failure and it really pretty much just came down to poor planning and not enough time to fix my poor planning because I didn't have another clear night. The problem here is the dust in CFIUS should actually somewhat extend down here into this part of the photo and the reason it just cuts off so abruptly there is because this is a mix of data from different cameras and different lenses and so the top half has all the data it needs and the bottom half is still missing some data from an 85 millimeter lens. And this is the kind of failure I really don't mind too much because all it means is I have to wait for my next opportunity to shoot the bottom part of the photo and then I can finish it. And I might even get a chance pretty soon because I'm going out to the Okitex star party in a couple weeks and that's a Bordel one zone so fingers crossed I can finish this project there and it'll look really cool I think when it's all done. Okay here's a failure where I had a strong vision which was to show the Boston skyline the Charles River and the entire Orion constellation setting over it all in HL for light and in mono and I tested shooting this a little bit here in Somerville but without a good landscape and I thought it looked pretty good from home sort of but it wasn't perfect but the first night I set up there I realized that my plan didn't really quite work with the lenses that I was hoping to use because Orion was much higher than I thought it would be for some reason and so I needed a much bigger sensor or a much wider lens to capture it all and I was paying by the hour because I was on top of a parking lot and for integrity's sake I was only going to shoot it when Orion was actually over the city so I was short on time which always leads to bad decisions and I decided I'm going to try this with this Samyang 14 millimeter wide lens that you know is pretty good for Milky Way shooting but looking at the photos quickly I thought wow yeah this looks good you know the whole field of view is exactly how I want it when I get home though I realized the stars look like triangles it looks like there's Vaseline on the lens or something and I realized the likely problem was back focus with filter thickness you can't really use thick narrowband filters effectively with wide angle lenses without getting tons of distortion unless you are very exacting about the back focus and so I still published the photos but acknowledged anyone you know and friends and things that I didn't think was that great and I might try again with different gear like either the Canon eSRA or something like that because I think the problem was just matching the wrong optics to the camera and filter I was using so I didn't get that kind of sharpness and detail that I wanted okay if you're still with me this last one is really a problem with pre-visualization meaning pre-visualization just means imaging or imagining the photo in your mind's eye before you take it and what I was imagining was this this would be the fill the entire frame here with with nebulosity but about 83 hours in you know the the bottom half of the photo is still not holding up to the top half so it's very top heavy and so what I ended up doing eventually is just cutting off the entire bottom half but that means 50 hours of work is gone so from this failure I learned the best thing with big projects is to continually test bring in the data into pics inside look at it see how it's going to work before going forward you know with this one I just had blind faith that it's going to work out in the edit I thought yeah it's gonna it's gonna look cool in the end but it just never did sort of meet my expectations for the photo and so these were some of my astrophiliers in terms of the creative process of astrophotography which is something that I felt like covering and hope to do more of because I feel like it's not talked about enough speaking of that Dylan O'Donnell just released a great video about the creative aspects of astrophotography about astrophotography styles and processing styles over on his channel and I really enjoyed that one and and do recommend you check it out well till next time this has been Nico Carver nebulaphotos.com clear skies