Nice post, thanks. I am always astonished by the amount of detail that a backyard photographer can achieve.
To celebrate these wonders, I have recently created an artwork with astrophotography from astrobin.com (really cool amateur astrophotography community). Maybe someone in this thread will be interested https://www.astrumnft.art
The collection relates to the 110 astronomic objects of the Messier Catalog.
Many of these nebulae that people see a lot on the internet are actually HUGE in the night sky, contrary to popular misconception that you need a Hubble telescope to capture many of them. A lot are much larger than a full moon, but just too dim for the naked eye to see. I've been doing a project to capture them in context with landscapes around California.
You can get quite a lot of detail with standard camera lenses; you just need a dark sky and a star tracker that lets you expose for long enough, and a different IR filter that cuts off at ~700nm instead of 640nm, so you can get the Hydrogen alpha line to pass through (which is actually within the visible band, but consumer cameras attenuate it to almost zero).
Backing this up / supporting this, the image of the California Nebula is 2.5° long. That's five moon diameters.
I've got a Nikon 200-500mm lens, which while on the long side of lenses most people have, isn't especially hard to get... and its easy to get a 500mm f/8 mirror lens (which has the same field of view, along with no issues with bokeh for astrophotography). With a full frame camera, its field of view is 5°00'. The California Nebula would take half the frame. With a DX lens, that would be 3°10'.
The bigger challenge is the tracking.
Btw, given:
> I've been doing a project to capture them in context with landscapes around California.
Have you headed out to the Alabama hills? Yea... its star trail photograph rather than specific nebula - http://www.panoscapes.com/showImage.php?partNo=P250H&catNo=7... (its shot a 6x17 film camera - each frame is 6cm x 17cm - that's one shot; if you look at the full size prints you can see airplanes and satellites)
> I've got a Nikon 200-500mm lens, which while on the long side of lenses most people have, isn't especially hard to get...
True. All you need to do is go online with a credit card. The thing is, that's a $1400 lens new that still sells for over $1000 used in decent condition. That's a pretty decent chunk of change. ;)
Get a used Nikkor ED Ai-S 180/2.8 or a Nikkor ED Ai-S 300/4.5 if you want to do the California nebula. Either should cost you under $200 if you're patient and good at eBay.
The bigger issue for the California nebula (specifically) might be that most of its light is at a narrow band of 656 nm which gets blocked off by stock consumer cameras; you might need to mod your camera's IR filter.
If you want an entry-level target, get either of the above lenses and image M31 (Andromeda galaxy) instead, which is visually of similar size to the California nebula anyway. Andromeda can be imaged easily with an unmodified camera. I always recommend Andromeda as a good entry level target for people after they've gotten bored of the Milky Way.
The most important thing will be to get a tracker, good sturdy tripod, and get to a dark place like a national park or national forest.
Of course. There's no reason you need the latest & greatest autofocus glass just to shoot stationary-ish celestial objects, that's for sure. And, that is one good thing about lenses, too: old lenses can keep on chugging literally for decades with little more attention than proper storage and some basic cleaning every once in a while.
I don't do astro, but I do shoot macro shots of stationary objects every once in a while. My workhorse lens is an older 105mm Nikkor (https://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/105mm-f28.htm) that you can get in excellent to mint condition for little enough money that if it breaks or you drop it or something, you can just buy a new one.
It's truly a nice piece of glass, even though it doesn't autofocus with my body or auto-meter. It's every bit as sharp as Nikon's newest version of the same lens (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/424744-USA/Nikon_2160...), at 1/3 the price (or less), and without features I don't particularly need shooting stationary objects. You can even shoot a decent portrait with it, if you're not bothered by the lack of autofocus. Turns out there are lots of opportunities to save a little money if you don't care about having a fast lens to autofocus on a moving subject. :-) I spent more on my copy stand and stabilization equipment than I did on glass, and that was 100% the right thing to do.
If I had to share some takeaways from my experiences buying and using my DSLR + other equipment, I would say to focus on what you actually need, don't worry about getting the latest and greatest, and definitely consider used equipment. Following those principles, I got myself a couple of nice macro lenses, a D3400 body, a Kaiser copy stand, a lighting setup, and the cables & software to drive all of that, for around or maybe a little more than $1000. And, it works great & serves my needs just fine. Had I gone with brand new and current model stuff, I'd probably be well over double that.
Yes definitely. I own only manual focus lenses, and most are used old lenses and of terrific optical quality. I hate autofocus. I understand its use for wildlife, sports, and war zone journalism, but that's not what I do.
I shoot a lot of astro, landscapes, and some portraits, and I have time to compose and shoot for all of these, and I don't want some gadgetry between my hand and the glass doing its own thing.
There is good modern glass available, but it's not the stuff sold to consumers at consumer prices. In the consumer price range I've consistently seen better glass in used old lenses from the 70s to 90s. Before that it starts to fall off rapidly due to lack of anti-dispersive elements and good coatings, but there are still a few odd gems here and there from even before then.
Oh and as a bonus, with manual glass I'm not tied into one ecosystem. I own about 5 or 6 brands of lenses; I can freely change my camera body brand and just buy some new adapters.
However, a 500mm f/8 mirror lens ($100) will do the job for astrophotography... and probably better for some aspects of it.
I'd also like to note that a lot of people spend more on the body of their camera than the glass (and accept using a 28-200 kit lens and complain image quality). It really should be the other way around - good glass is (nearly) forever. I got my 200-500 in 2015... and it was to double up / replace an 80-400 that I got in... 2013? Overall, my average spend of photography equipment is under $1000/year and that's an acceptable spot for a serious hobby.
I personally prefer long glass and have a particular style of photography I do with it (tightly cropped waterfalls are my favorite) and so I gravitate to the more expensive long lenses with a limited zoom range or prime lenses. ... but that's me.
> I'd also like to note that a lot of people spend more on the body of their camera than the glass (and accept using a 28-200 kit lens and complain image quality). It really should be the other way around - good glass is (nearly) forever.
I agree. I see people doing that and I just can't help wonder what they're thinking. A lot of people will get a bigger increase in image quality by using a $50 tripod instead of shooting freehand, rather than by buying the latest and greatest body.
They're even older than a good chunk of my glass. A pair of Manfrotto legs. One with a 3047 head, one with... I'd have to look it up, its another pan tilt head. Then there's also a carbon fiber with a rather light ball head (that's the one I take when I have to walk a distance). Everything is hex plate. I'd consider the arca-swiss heads, but when I was getting a good tripod I couldn't find a pan tilt head that I liked that was reasonable in the set of heads. The Arca-Swiss C1 didn't come out until later... and... well... yea.
While the $50 tripod is ok... the tripod often has issues like its only waist height without extending the (cracked) center column which increases its instability. They often don't have good QR systems and that leads to people not using it.
A reasonable tripod head is about $150. An acceptable aluminum tripod can be found for another $100... and those are worlds better than the $50 tripod. It wasn't something I learned until I broke my 3rd plastic tripod (or couldn't find more QR plates) in two years. I still have the 3001 & 3047 tripod that I got after that in... '00? or '01?
Again, this is a "invest in something good and it will last a lifetime" rather than "get the cheap equipment that will fail in a year or you will become dissatisfied with."
Sort of, you can see the Milky Way easily if you just go to a rural area, and you'll see that even if there is no light pollution it's much dimmer to the eye than you see in photos.
Most of the other nebulae you can't really see at all with your naked eye no matter how dark it is, human eyes just aren't that sensitive. The Orion nebula is one exception, as it's extremely bright for nebula standards, you can see the core part of that nebula with your eye easily.
These photos are more like what the night sky would look like if it was dark AND our eyes were much more sensitive. Maybe some animals actually see it that way, I don't know too much about biology.
> Nice post, thanks. I am always astonished by the amount of detail that a backyard photographer can achieve.
Not only that, but you can achieve some pretty nice results with just a DSLR or mirrorless camera, a remote trigger, and a tripod. Literally just aiming the camera at something and opening the shutter for a few minutes can get you results that, while they aren't going to be on par with some of the images linked here, are definitely going to be pretty cool looking. A lot of the tricks of the trade are really post-production techniques, rather than shooting techniques.
Sky & Telescope says it better than I do, but, the TL;DR of this comment is "you don't need a lot of equipment, and it's not hard to get started."
If you open the shutter for a couple of minutes, you'll get streaks. Even with the 30 seconds recommended in that article, you'll get slightly elongated blobs instead of stars. (Unless you use an 18mm lens or shorter)
But still, it's true - it's easy to get started, and all you need is a tripod, a camera, & a remote trigger. You can skip the latter if your camera has a delayed trigger. (But fair warning - if your hobbies tempt you to get new toys, this is a dangerous hobby to have. There are LOTS of toys ;)
It’s likely that some of them are constructed through “stacking”. The technique is easy to pull off, with software built for that specific purpose.
You take your N long exposures, and then have the program map the movement of stars around you during those (if you do 20 30s exposures, you’ve spent ~10 minutes on it, so the stars will have shifted). Then the program corrects that motion and sums the images. It’s a cheaper and easier way to “simulate” a longer exposure, that would require a tracking system otherwise.
This is neat: some Pentax cameras that have GPS, a compass, and most importantly a sensor attached to small motors that allow it to move inside the camera (normally used for in-body image stabilization), also can compensate for the movement of stars in a photo by rotating the sensor to keep the stars stationary relative to the camera. The GPS is needed to tell how the stars overhead will actually rotate.
I assume that this means that anything stationary on the earth will be blurred instead, but still very cool.
Yes, part of the “art” of stacking is choosing a location where you can easily create a mask that covers the sky but not the ground to avoid blurry artifacts, and then blending the two sections seamlessly.
That's just the nature of astronomy photography. Often hundreds of photos are stiched to make the final image. For some subjects and shots it's the only possible way it can work.
yeah stacking is not photography anymore tbh. its more editing than anuthing else and the sky looks nothing like these pictures if you do not use such techniques.
My understanding is that the same is true of images from Hubble etc, they are false coloured etc., so I don’t really see this as a big issue in this case
So the Hubble is good at extracting huge amounts of detail from small objects in the night sky, but what most people don't know is that the sky is also filled with nearby (in astronomical terms) objects that are HUGE, and fairly easy to capture with backyard equipment.
For example, Andromeda is 6 times the visual size of the moon, the Rosette nebula is over twice the visual size of the moon, and so on.
The only reason you don't see them that way is that they are too dim. I've been doing a project to capture them in context of landscapes to rectify this misconception.
We would be able to see things like this if only our eyes were more sensitive. All of my images were taken with DSLR lenses, not even a telescope.
Wow those are really pretty. If it’s not too much to ask, could you briefly outline what’s involved in making such beautiful images? What kinda gear? Are you adding colour and things post?
- Normal DSLR camera with the IR filter taken out and a different (~700nm cutoff) IR filter put in -- you don't need this for broadband objects like galaxies but for emission nebulae that have a lot of 656nm light, it helps a lot. For some emission nebulae I use an dual-narrowband (H-alpha and O-III lines) filter.
- Some pretty normal camera lenses. Actually mostly 30-40 year old manual focus lenses that are built much better than today's plastic crap and easier to focus properly. I highly recommend the Nikkor ED Ai-S 180/2.8 and Nikkor ED Ai-S IF 300/4.5 if you want a couple of winners.
- A sturdy tripod that won't vibrate in the wind. Heavier the better. None of that carbon fiber BS. Steel is good. Video camera tripods work well.
- Tracking mount, such as an iOptron Skyguider Pro in my case.
All of the images I take are as close to natural color as I can make them, since landscapes in false color aren't exactly good looking. Most Hubble images on the other hand are false-color, and for a good reason: The Hydrogen and Sulfur lines both fall in the red, so in order to be able to visually distinguish the chemical processes they assign S to red, H to green, O to blue. This is commonly called the "Hubble palette". In my case O spans green-blue and S/H are both in the red, and although you can't really distinguish S from H in my pictures, but that's how they would look if our eyes were more sensitive.
Agreed these are spectacular. A lot of these pictures are very wide frame shots, so Hubble level magnification isn't really necessary. Instead you need a good camera, mount, atmospheric conditions, and some serious Photoshop chops. I tried to get into astrophotography a while back and was amazed by it's complexity!
To be sure it's not an exact match but hey, try also comparing the outline of constellations to the giant figures they're supposed to represent. It does require a fair bit of imagination.
Oh, yeah, I can definitely see it better in that one. The OP shot looks like it includes a lot more wavelengths, or maybe the photographer just went a little crazy with the colors. The one you linked looks like it just emphasizes H-alpha? In any case, it looks much more like California, IMO.
To celebrate these wonders, I have recently created an artwork with astrophotography from astrobin.com (really cool amateur astrophotography community). Maybe someone in this thread will be interested https://www.astrumnft.art The collection relates to the 110 astronomic objects of the Messier Catalog.