One of the most frustrating things when you're just starting out in DSLR astrophotography is
not being able to find the galaxy or nebula you want to shoot or even worse thinking you found
it only to stack your images the next day and realizing you weren't actually pointed at it
in this video we're going to look at the very best tried and true methods for finding deep
sky objects and then I'll show you a crucial final step that will allow us to confirm we're
pointed in the right spot even when the object is completely obscured by heavy light pollution
hello i'm Nico and this channel is all about helping people learn the amazing hobby of amateur
astrophotography my website is nebulaphotos.com and if you like what you see consider joining us
over on Patreon which starts at just one dollar per month so the topic today is something that
can be super frustrating even for me who has been doing astrophotography for several years now and
that's the issue of actually finding and framing up a deep sky object like a galaxy or a nebula
that you can't actually see sometimes until you process it on the computer so how do we find
something we can't see well for astrophotography through the star patterns and you can think of
star patterns as being sort of like landmarks when giving directions just like you could tell someone
when you see the blue house take a left in the night sky we could say when you see these three
bright stars in a line that's Orion's belt so just follow those up this way until you
see this triangle of stars and then you're on your object and there are two main ways to use the star
patterns and we're going to use them both tonight the old school but still very reliable way is a
process called star hopping which is basically looking at a star atlas or planetarium app that
charts the stars and then looking at your camera and the night sky and finding out what direction
you need to move to get closer and closer to your target until you're there and the hopping part
is we use bright stars to make a few hops from one bright star to the next until we're there and that
makes the whole thing a lot easier once you get used to it and i want to say this is a crucial
skill that i'd really encourage everyone to learn i'm going to be demonstrating it of course in this
video but it's a skill that really rewards actual practice and patience under the night sky the new
school way which also uses the star patterns is actually to turn your photo over to some computer
software called a plate solver that looks at the image and based on the patterns of the stars
solves it meaning it figures out exactly where in the sky you're pointed
and it will actually label the bright stars and you know galaxies and nebulae that appear in
the photo and so the ultimate solution i found is actually using both methods because we don't want
to just be constantly plate solving that takes a lot of time so we're going to star hop until
we get in the right general direction and when we think we're pretty close we'll use plate solving
with a free website called astrometry.net to make sure we're really in the right spot and if needed
we can fine tune from there before we jump outside let me just give you a quick rundown of the kind
of gear books apps all that kind of stuff that is most helpful for finding objects and what
i'll be using tonight for the demo is a canon camera and lens on a skywatcher star adventurer
but this demo will work with just a fixed tripod it'll work with different kinds of cameras
you don't need the tracker so it's really just that's what i'm going to be using to show it next
up let's talk about finder devices and the idea of a finder device is it makes it easier to get
immediate feedback of where you're pointed in the night sky and for star hopping this is critical
because it'll help you to get to that first bright star quickly so one thing we have here this is
a green laser finder and so it just is a green laser you can see so this one is from scope stuff
and it has the finder shoe attachment so i can easily put it on top of my DSLR just like that
and this is just one example of a finder device you can get i do like the green laser but check
with your local laws on using them because in some places they're forbidden or illegal
and also never use one near a major flight path or when you see an airplane in the sky
because you don't want to blind a pilot on the very inexpensive end this is a little pricey we
have something else called a red dot finder this works very similarly instead of seeing the green
light like that you just see a little red dot in the middle here and you can cite your object
easily and then a little bit more expensive than a red dot finder and quite a bit bigger is a tell
rad but this makes a full red target that's that's really easy to see on the night sky so this would
be more for like a telescope no matter what kind of finder you use it's important to make sure it's
calibrated so that the finder and the camera lens are actually pointed in the same spot and i always
do this calibration at home with the green laser you would just you know shine the green laser
against a wall and then just make sure that it lines up on your camera's view screen right in
the center of the live view if you're using a red dot finder same idea you just adjust these little
screws until it's all lined up with whatever you have centered on the camera's view screen okay
next thing we need is some kind of star chart or sky atlas and i always keep physical paperback
star atlases but mostly as a backup the truth is i don't use these kinds as much these days because
the phone apps just offer so many more features on the high end i really like sky safari pro it
often goes on sale so i'd wait for a sale if you haven't purchased it yet but it just has
tons of cool features including letting me have a big database of my gear so i can put overlays
which are a field of view to get an idea with different cameras and lenses and telescopes
and i mentioned this because it can be really useful also for star hopping
because you can see exactly how star patterns will look on the screen on your camera screen
if you do want to do this fov indicator for free stellarium on the computer will do all this too
and i'm going to be doing a stellarium video pretty soon i think um so i'll talk more about
that but the app i'll be using tonight is a free one it's called sky i think it's android only but
many apps will do what it does it's basically just a sky map and as i move the phone around it uses
the phone's compass and gyroscope to figure out roughly where i'm pointed now unfortunately i have
found this isn't super accurate it's just sort of roughly accurate partly because i think any
things that metallic or magnetic fields in the area will throw it off and so there are
a few things that this app suggests doing to improve the accuracy one is to wave your phone
in a figure eight motion to calibrate the internal sensors in the phone and the other is it suggests
adding alignment points when you know you're centered on certain stars and so you'll see me
doing that in the demo i'm not sure how much it really helps but maybe it'll help a little
bit i should also mention in the demo you'll see that my phone is going to be attached in a phone
holder thing like this attached to an l bracket right next to the camera i don't actually
recommend this setup um it makes it easier to film what i'm doing but i think all this metal pieces
is throwing off the magnetic compass so a better way to make it sort of a side-by-side adapter like
this would be purely out of wood and plastic so i might do that see if it helps but i haven't
gotten around to it yet so other than telling us roughly where we're pointed i can also search
in the app for whatever deep sky object we're trying to find this is where there are lots of
differences in the different planetarium apps both in how many objects they have in their database
and does it require a data connection for the search to work because some will download the
whole catalog some won't so i'd suggest evaluating this in different apps before heading out
somewhere remote another reason i'm willing to pay for sky safari pro is that it's still fully
functional without a data connection and it has a huge database of stars and deep sky objects
but back to the free eyes sky when we want to find something we can just click this little menu icon
click search and then tonight i'll be demoing messier 81 so in that case we just click the
messier tab then search 81 and tap it and now you may be wondering why not just start with that
instead of star hopping well i found that that can work okay for really bright easy to find objects
like andromeda or orion or the lagoon which are sort of easy to find even without a phone
and i've made videos about using it in this basic way but for harder to find stuff star
hopping will be more reliable and we can use star hopping in conjunction with this app and i'll show
that in the demo okay i'm out on the field i've just finished polar aligning the star adventurer
you can see polaris is centered on the camera here i also centered it on the app and with my
green laser and now i'm going to go ahead and loosen up the ra clutch and then the
deck clutch and get us pointed at our first star in our star hopping which is going to be
dubi which is part of uh the big dipper pretty easy to find i'm just gonna do some fine alignment
here with uh both axes until i get it sort of centered on the dslr screen and i'm just turning
off and on my laser to do this to know where i'm pointed now instead of going to m81 which i could
from here i'm going to hop to a different star in ursa major because that will give me a feel for
sort of how the directions with ra and dec work so i'm going to go over here to this 23 ursa major
and i've got i've gone ahead and found that so now i'm going to go ahead and head to
m81 um and i'm just using my app to sort of give me an idea of the direction here
i'm actually going to overshoot a little bit because i want to show you the fine-tuning thing
a little bit more okay so i'm going to take a test exposure just a one second test exposure i'm gonna
do this at high iso so i can really see the star as well and then i'm gonna go ahead and get that
picture that test exposure onto my phone and i'm going to first show doing this with the canon
connect app uh which is a little bit uh difficult you have to put it on its own wi-fi network
and then go through a couple steps here it's not too bad it's gotten a lot better over the years
i'm also going to show a way to do this without wi-fi camera connect so don't worry i'll show
that at the end um so here we go here's all the pictures i can take them in raw and still
import them as a reduced jpeg which is great that's what i'm going to do here
and now that it's on my phone i'm going to go ahead and open up um or first i'm going to turn
off the wi-fi on my phone so that it's connecting back to mobile data and then i'm going to open up
google chrome and go to nova.astrometry.net upload and click on choose the file i'll just find it on
my phone here under files it's the most recent file this uh jpeg and i'll upload it to this
website and this is the plate solver so this is going to actually figure out exactly where i'm
pointed right now and it takes a couple minutes i'm going to speed up this part of the video but
it'll sort of give you a little update as it goes and when it's all done plate solving it will say
success and then give you an option to go to the results and so we'll go ahead and do that
and here's what we see and i can see right from this little
thing right here that we're not yet on m8192 so how do we know how to get there from here well i'm
going to show you one way to do it which is i'm going to open up the view in worldwide telescope
option so over here on the right hand side click on this link that says view in worldwide telescope
and it'll show you something like this it'll zoom in at first so just
you know zoom back out by double finger sort of swipe and i can see m8182 right there
and i can see there's my camera view screen the bottom is right there with this pink line
and so i need to move the stars down about one full camera sensors uh height to get to m8182
so i find this really useful because it gives me an idea of how the camera's sensor is oriented
on the sky and then i can know which direction i need to move the stars to get to my target
if you're close that is if you're further away then you're gonna have to go back to star hopping
but when you're this close we can just sort of know okay if i move uh in this direction about
this far i'll be right on so i just have to move the top uh stars down to the bottom and a little
bit off the sensor and then i'll be right on m8182 so let's figure out the direction we have
to do it and it looks like i have to move in this direction to make the stars go down so i'm going
to go ahead and do that until they start at the top is going right off the bottom of the screen
and then i should be right on m81/82 let me go ahead and take another test exposure at high iso
and there we go and again because we're in this heavy light pollution i don't know if i
can really see 81/82 here but when i plate solve it yep there they are right in the middle of the
screen as we would expect oh so and then i'm going to go ahead and open it up in worldwide telescope
and i want to show you this little image crossfade thing because that's pretty cool
so there's this little image crossfaded here at the bottom the slider and i can just very
quickly see there's m81/82 and there's my picture and you can see that you know if you
really knew where to look you could find them in the picture but they're almost invisible um
because they're really just little these faint smudges and they're quite small at the focal
length i'm at so that gives you an idea i want to mention the the method that i'm going to use
here is the last example that we're going to do which is what to do if you don't have wi-fi on
your camera so you can't easily transfer images to your phone this method was shared with me by
a 13 year old astrophotographer named arcturus astro who told me about this on a live stream
and so the way we're going to do it is instead of transferring we're just going to take a picture
of our DSLR's screen in playback mode you want to make sure that if you if there's any info
displayed on the screen that you turn all of that off and you turn off the flash on your camera and
then just get as close as possible make sure to tap on the screen so that it focuses there
and sets the exposure there and then go ahead and open that picture up in your app and crop it down
so that you just have the screen and nothing else so we're just going to crop it just like
this be pretty careful to get as much as we can but nothing else crop perfect and then click save
and then we're going to upload that to astrometry.net of course the cropped picture that
we just took of the screen and i have tried this a number of times now and it's worked every time
so i'm quite impressed with astrometry.net and this method that was shared to me by a curse astro
of just taking a picture of your screen and i think it's actually what i'll do in the future
rather than dealing with the canon app because this is just really easy and it seems to always
work so that's it for this video hope you enjoyed you can see some of my other videos here linked
and also join us on Patreon and make sure to subscribe if you haven't see you next time