Hey everyone Nico here for this week's Five Minute Friday where each Friday i delve into
astrophotography topics for about five minutes i'm gonna answer some of your questions from Instagram
so the first question is: what source of learning would you recommend for beginners well everyone's
a bit different in this regard personally i like learning best from books and articles
you know the written word others have told me they really prefer video there's a lot of stuff
out there so it's really just about finding the teachers that you click with whether that's me
or another astrophotographer on youtube or a blogger or an author one of the first books i
purchased that is about astrophotography and is still probably my favorite is this one
it's uh called the deep sky imaging primer by charles bracken and i just find it really
clear and i like how it delves into things and how they work but it's really approachable with lots
of illustrations okay next question is what is the most annoying pre-imaging thing that you have to
do in your workflow well i live on in a house but i'm on the third floor in an apartment and there's
no elevators i have to walk down three flights of stairs with heavy equipment and it takes about
a dozen trips up and down uh to pack up the car so on a night like tonight where the temp's over 30
degrees celsius it's pretty annoying because i get completely drenched in sweat do you have an art
or music style that inspires your work in astro that's a great question and yes both for art i'm
really inspired by sort of like landscape painters and photographers and i'll put a few images up
i mentioned this book about the hubble images in another video but i'll bring
it up again because elizabeth kessler also makes some great
connections between astrophotography and landscape paintings in this book um
and so i really recommend it for a music style i like listening to like really energetic
classical music like uh vivaldi i'll add it to the video here so you can get an idea
and i listen to that while i'm editing my pictures and it really
inspires me and and sort of gets the creative juices flowing for me
okay if you could go back in time and give your astro beginner self some advice what would it be
it would be to spend less time and money buying and selling equipment and more time finding dark
skies and shooting under them it took me i think way too long to realize how big a difference a
dark sky truly makes um i mean a standard piece of advice i find myself giving today is before
you blame the equipment try that same equipment out under a dark sky you'll be amazed at how big a
difference it makes and it's it's probably not the camera's faulty of noise it's the light pollution
you know getting a newer dslr doesn't fix light pollution now eventually i did build a setup
so that i can image from the city with mono and narrow band and all that really expensive stuff
but as a beginner i wish i just spent more time with simple gear under dark skies
rather than making all these incremental changes to the gear because a lot of those changes really
didn't help okay here's a big question what is the meaning of astrophotography for you
well for me astrophotography is both a hobby it's a hobby that i really became passionate about
i enjoy discussing it learning new techniques teaching other people but i also want to say
that i see the potential of astrophotography to be a fine art and i i been enjoying discussing this
with other people there was a presentation that gary lopez organized recently with j.p mitzvanio
and gary lopez also organizes a group over on astrobin called fine art astrophotography i think
my my aspiration is is really to be considered an artist whose medium is astrophotography now
whether i reach that ideal sooner or later i don't know but that's that's how that's sort of what i'm
reaching for is to is to really um make artworks okay let's end with a rapid fire around here i
have them all lined up uh what is your age i'm 35 what is your middle name my middle name is byron
um what's my dream destination for a star gazing trip i got to say brazil then i could see the
southern skies are do you plan to do workshops in person workshops i don't have any immediate
plans but in the future i'm not going to rule it out maybe that'd be really cool if i could get
that organized favorite planet is saturn what do you do other than astrophotography my day job is
i'm a librarian at the center for astrophysics i also have other hobbies like playing the piano and
cooking and hiking and things like that what do you do on nights that aren't clear and i actually
have a video on this uh some ideas from that video were to build a dark library read astronomy books
and nowadays personally i'm often working on this youtube channel okay is it possible to
get photos of deep sky objects with a diy tracker definitely i have a video on making and using a
diy tracker i captured the row of yuki cloud complex with it and i have some future videos
planned as well where i'll try out other objects and and improvements to the tracker well that does
it for this week's Five Minute Friday this has been Nico Carver nebulaphotos.com clear skies