Hey, my name is Nico and today i'm going to do
a giveaway and q&a to celebrate 50,000 subscribers on youtube!
This video is not sponsored. All the stuff i'm giving away are things i've bought myself to
use for making videos in the past year on youtube and now i'm giving those things away to you there
are five prizes you can choose to either win a sky watcher star adventurer pro pack
this is a very nice star tracker setup and the only reason i'm giving this one away
is i bought a new one that has the wi-fi control but this one works just as well honestly the wi-fi
is pretty unnecessary i'm also giving away a stock canon 60d with two lenses just a cheap
zoom lens and a nifty 50 f 1.8 prime lens this is a great starter camera and lens so you could just
get a tripod and start shooting orion nebula with it for the more experienced astrophotographers
i'm giving away three different two inch light pollution filters we got the optolong l-pro
the astronomic cls and the sv bony cls the full details and rules for the giveaway are
in the description uh there's two links but listen up right now for how to enter to enter
you need to fill out the first link the google form that's linked right below in the description
that google form is password protected and the password is going to be given out one
letter or number at a time throughout this video just like this in the corner
so the first letter in the password is capital n just open up a node app or some scratch paper
and watch the video to get the full password if you try to share the password in the comments
i will delete your comment please fill out the form in the next week for a chance to enter
and you only get to enter to win one thing so please pick what you will actually use one thing
to consider is i'm guessing there's going to be less competition uh to win a filter so i'm just
going to because i'm just going to pick randomly so your odds are based on how many people enter
the giveaway and pick that item so your odds will probably go down if you choose the star tracker
okay enough said about that let's answer uh some of the questions you sent me i got so many good
questions so i'm just going to have to pick some i'm going to start with the question i got the
most and i think mr kurtovsky summed it up well here how did you get started with astrophotography
what were your first gear and results and what were you struggling most at the beginning just
give us a full niko story and i'm going to tack on one more question here which is another common one
i got which is sort of what's your best beginner advice because i think it's related to all of this
so let's start back at the beginning i first got interested in the world of night photography in
2014 so seven years ago now i was visiting iceland in the winter with the hope of seeing the aurora
borealis the northern lights and at that time i was really into time-lapse photography as a hobby
here's some of my time-lapse shots from that trip and i was i was lucky enough to shoot the aurora
as a time lapse too and it wasn't until uh months later that occurred to me to actually edit a
single photo from that time lapse and when i was just playing around with that image in photoshop
so this was like the spring of of 2015 now i found wow there's so much here if i just brighten up the
photo and play around with it and that was that light bulb moment for me that really got me hooked
initially so i stuck with wide angle stuff i was using canon 5d rooking on lenses on a tripod for
about a year i got some okay milky way shots like this but eventually in my research about this i
stumbled onto deep sky astrophotography which always intrigued me and i was sort of hemming
and hawing and delaying getting started because i wasn't sure i could afford it i didn't want to
buy telescope right away but i found um you know a tracker and that maybe i could do that and in
january of 2016 i got a used astro track star tracker and on my first night out in january i
got this picture of orion and i was blown away the fact that i could see those colors from the city
that was the moment where my mind was blown and i knew this hobby was what i was looking for
since then i've really spent almost all of my free time and money
towards getting better and better at it in terms of what i was struggling most at the beginning
i'd say the new equipment rabbit hole basically this is how this rabbit hole works you you go out
something isn't working you become frustrated you give up on imaging that night
you go online and some person trying to help from their experience says oh well you just
need this new gadget auto guiding or whatever it is and your your problem will be solved
so you go buy some more equipment you wait for another clear night and even if that new gadget
fixed your first problem which it probably didn't you now have a bunch of new problems
and you still haven't produced any images and so this is a pretty common experience for the deep
sky astrophotographer it's what happened to me and my advice to get out of that rabbit hole is
is not that we can never buy any new gear of course the gear is fun it's part of the hobby but
my advice is don't add anything new until you feel confident that you've mastered and reached
the limit of what you have so if you're having a problem always first try to solve it creatively
with what you have that's going to allow you to build a good foundation for your astrophotography
and teach you how to problem solve which is way more valuable than owning a bunch of
expensive equipment that you don't know how to use properly okay astronaut yet asks in some photos i
see a few stars with a very spiky pattern while other stars in the same photo look like blobs
is that an optical effect of the lens or telescope or can we deliberately achieve something like that
answer to that is yes and yes it is something that's caused by the telescope or lens but you
can also create them they're called diffraction spikes and they will appear on bright stars while
they're also on dimmer stars they're usually too dim to see in the case of a newtonian
telescope like this one they're caused by these spider veins holding in the secondary mirror
in the case of a camera lens they only appear when you stop down the lens using the internal aperture
blades because that that iris isn't perfectly round um you won't see diffraction spikes on
refractor telescopes typically or lenses when they are wide open when the aperture is wide open
so if you want to create them in those cases you can tape something really thin
like dental floss or fishing line to the front of your lens or refractor telescope
okay marco asks how do you manage the change in sleep cycles when spending the nights outside
well me personally not well i'm i'm the kind of person who just stays
out all night working the whole time on various setups and things for youtube or
you know my personal astrophotography and then i just lose out on that night's sleep or maybe
i get home and i can get a couple of hours as the sun is rising um i really want to get better
at this now that i'm you know getting older and things but with my style of imaging i'm just not
sure realistically i'll get that much better at getting more sleep until something really changes
in my life like i get an observatory in a dark sky or something like that but not anytime soon okay
toshaw asks i have a 60 millimeter refractor with an alt as mount which i use for astrophotography
along with my phone if i want to get better pictures do i change my telescope or my camera
if so any recommendations so in this particular case i'd recommend upgrading the camera first i
would recommend you know you can enter my giveaway or you can buy try to get a used canon or nikon
dslr with the lens and you can attach that to the alt as mount to do some basic tracking you know 20
30 second exposures and get much better deep sky photos that way phone cameras are getting better
but they're still very small sensors compared to a dslr and by shooting through the eyepiece also
because you're of the lens on the phone you're losing a lot of potential light compared to doing
it other ways um now the caveat if you already own a telescope and you're thinking of attaching
a dslr to it in what we call prime focus that not that doesn't always work on cheap telescopes so
do a little bit of research on google first some telescopes are really not designed to work with a
camera in prime focus especially newtonians like this one often don't have enough inward travel
on the focuser to reach focus with a dslr so before you buy a dslr to work with your telescope
make sure it will work polemon watchtech asks how do you take astro photos during winter time when
it is like negative 10 degrees celsius and snow how to protect equipment is it necessary and is
the settings different okay so mostly it's the same and you get free camera cooling from the
the low temperatures which always helps with noise especially if you're using a dslr or mirrorless
camera a couple tips i have is give yourself some extra time because everything takes longer in the
snow and cold you don't want to rush because that's when you might make mistakes put on way
more layers than you think is necessary like just really overdo it because when you're just
sitting out there in the cold not generating any body heat you will get insanely cold
all batteries but especially in phones and laptops i've noticed don't last as long so be prepared
for that extra batteries external battery banks anything like that
if setting up your tripod in the snow i'd suggest bringing a shovel and digging out little holes
in the snow for where the tripod feet goes because snow will come compress over time
and it's just not very stable compared to solid ground so i'd always dig out the snow and put your
tripod on that another reason to do that if i've had tripod feet come off in the snow and then
they're basically impossible to find until the snow melts okay jj from long island new york
asks do you have any suggestions for some wide field targets during galaxy season other than
the more popular ones for those that don't know uh galaxy season is roughly march through may
in the northern hemisphere um but the problem is and it just means when the earth you know and we
in the northern hemisphere have this good view of a lot of galaxies the problem is that most
galaxies are very small so they don't look that good in wide fields like with a camera lens and so
my suggestion is to stay up late or wake up early and start shooting the many great wide fields in
one of my favorite constellations cygnus which rises surprisingly high even as early as march for
us in here in the north uh you just need to be up at the right time which is around 3 a.m or so but
that's my advice okay me hollow asks why are you doing youtube uh basically just because i enjoy it
pretty much every aspect of it i most of all it's i really like the feeling of helping other people
but also i have a lot of past experience with videography and editing and i like those things
it's nice to keep those skills active and i hope to do more creative videos in the future okay i
know i only got to a very small percentage of the questions but thank you very much if you submitted
a question i've saved all of them and i'll be using them to help me generate new video ideas or
just to incorporate them into future videos so hopefully your question will get answered
eventually just keep watching this channel okay this is the end of the video now but remember to
enter the giveaway you should hopefully have the full password now and uh subscribe to this channel
if you haven't until next time this has been Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com. Clear skies!