Hey, Nico 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 3:00
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 common NEOWISE 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 comment 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
treeline and wouldn't be a very good shot so what I'm gonna do instead is I'm
going to travel just a little bit to get up 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 gonna be doing this with a lightweight setup because I don't want
to have to since I'm going to be traveling I don't and traveling to a new
place for me I don't want to bring too much stuff so it's a it's a setup that I
can lift with one hand it's the Sky Watcher star adventurer a ball head my
Canon 5d Mark 3 and the Rokinon 135 f2 and I think this will provide a good
field of view for the comet a full frame with 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 gonna get streak stars if you don't if you're not
tracking so that's why I have the star tracker but the comet is definitely
capturable 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 comment
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 comet NEOWISE sorry I didn't show the setup but I was
rushing to get this set up 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 3 seconds to 2 seconds to 1 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 like 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 lighthouse and the boats so again I was using the Sky Watcher star adventure
my Canon 5d with the 135 millimeter 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 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 the
nucleus of the of the comet as the registration point I can I can bring out
a little bit more detail but I'm gonna pack up and head home okay 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 favours 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 looked the most in focus and everything looked good and I'll just
show you how I process just this single exposure hopefully comment NEOWISE does
stick around and we can and I can do something maybe with my Astrotech 60d at
360 millimetres focal length and really get in there on the comet in 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 to how I
went around about editing this sort of Astro snapshot just a single frame it's
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 at 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 the sunrise part I
don't like how dark it gets along the horizon so it looks sort of unnatural so
what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to click on the adjustment layers mask
whenever you added an adjustment layer it comes with a layer mask already
included I'm just gonna grab my gradient tool here and draw a gradient directly
on the mask and the way I'm gonna draw this gradient is I don't I I like of
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 or 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 okay so I'm happy with that the only other thing
that I really want to do is just bring out the this part of the picture a
little bit because it's so dark that there's not much of interest and it's
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 B ctrl J
on Windows and bringing that above everything else
so this is back to the original picture and I want to I'm gonna 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 it 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 okay 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
okay so that was before and that's after right so it makes a pretty subtle
difference but it just adds a little bit more of interest to that corner and I
could I might play around with that gradient a little bit until I thought
that looks right okay there we go so you can see I just 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 gonna go ahead and press F twice and that's my Astro snapshot 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 gonna definitely shoot this again at a
higher focal length I'm planning around 300 to 400 millimeters. All right till
next time this was Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com