This channel is all about astrophotography. Follow me to understand how to image the night sky and get the most out of your images.
I have been an amateur landscape photographer for about 15 years and moved into astrophotography around the start of lockdown in the UK because I couldn't go anywhere. I already had most of the kit required and this is how I started.
A lot has changed since 2020 and I've got the bug upgraded my kit a few times, swapped the camera lenses for telescopes and DSLRs for dedicated astrophotography cameras but I still remember what it was like to take that first deep sky image.
@@astrojourneyuk No problem! 🙂 The video is very informative anyway. It has confinced me to go clean my MON2/EQ5 mount. Only need to order the correct grease.. 😉
Enjoyed your video, but I seem to have issues with Lunar mode............all photos come out slightly blurry using Auto Focus, are you manually focusing? And, if I do a video and use ASI Video Stack the resulting image comes out with a hard to remove blue color cast, have you experience that issue? I seem to get much better lunar images with a DSLR and telephoto lens despite what many seem to say about the Seestar's lunar capabilities. Your thoughts on what I might try to get sharper editable images would be appreciated.
I tend to use auto focus but select an area to focus on that has some contrast for it to work with. I’m now hitting that age where my eyes see less in focus than a camera would. I must get some glasses!
It’s an interesting comparison of the SeeStar vs a DSLR. The lens and sensor I wouldn’t be surprised would be better because of the sensor size difference. I think the seestar does manage nice social media and family sharing images but for detail I’d go with an SLR.
Thanks for the heads up, I have moved the focus area often for Solar shots trying to zero in on sunspots, should have been a no brainer for the moon as well.......will certainly give it a go next time out!
@@astrojourneyuk Thanks, and I agree...........especially for close ups, I tend to get somewhat fuzzy edges if I try to zoom to 2x or 4x with the Seestar, but sharp images with a 600mm on my Nikon D7500 using a tracker.
I have found the amp glow stubborn to fully remove, the best solution I found was to rotate the camera 180 degrees mid way through shooting. Then the amp glow gets 'painted out' by the image. When you have a starless nebula layer you can also use a clone tool to paint it out. If you have a meridian flip halfway through, that sorts it nicely (how I discovered the 180 flip trick).
Thank you so much for this great video, I have a big question, how do you stick the 4 panels together ? or it wil be done by the Asiair ??? I will centanly need to put them together before star processing, otherwise I would never achieve consistance color and exposure in the four panels.
@@astrojourneyuk the ones that I experienced were huge refractor and reflector type from college. Compare to yours, you have an extraordinary that can catch celestials bodies. I think colleges should upgrade. There.
That’s interesting. These days lots of astrophotographers capture targets like this with equipment that amateurs can own. Some is a lot more expensive than others. The SkyWatcher 200P is great for the money. :)
Awesome Andromeda! My goal is to get that good at both capturing and mostly processing. I just ordered the redcat 51 Wanted something in-between my Askar fma180 pro and a Astro tech 60 Ed Good job all of them!
Mmmm. Possibly. I did you it to image a chimney stack on a house but that was about 50 meters away. There’s a possibly without trying that the target might be too small still.
Great presentation, but I have a question. Can this telescope be connected to a computer and detected as a camera, or is it only compatible with a phone app? The main goal is to conduct several-hour live streams on platforms like Facebook or RU-vid and observe the moon.
It’s not something I’ve tried. The usb is just for transfers of images as far as I’m aware. Maybe you could screen cast from a phone or tablet somehow?
I’ve always thought I should do two versions, one short and snappy and one at a gentler pace. Maybe slow the video down in RU-vid, that might work? I’ve not tried though.
well if you had a bad seeing, you were not under sampling that much. in any case, under sampling is just another way to say that you are not capturing the full resolution you could. you still get an image in the end and the 2600 is a good camera, so you still get a good image. not much surprising here ? admittedly, i watched the video very quickly so I may have missed your point
Great video. Very clear. I’ve just imaged C/2021 S3 (PANSTARRS), which is currently at magnitude circa 12, so a bit of challenge for my WO GT81. I’d be grateful for some advice :- Would you recommend the incorporation of SPCC and GHS into your workflow now ? Kind regards Mark
I know this was a while ago, but I'm just looking at this issue now and I completely agree - the acceptability of the results depends on what you will use the image for, particularly if posting on social media is the goal. That said, I see the fully processed image at the end of the video and even on a computer screen with RU-vid's compression algorithm at play, I do detect a noticeable difference in depth and definition in that image compared to others I've seen from "matched" cameras and scopes from other astrophotographers. So not totally without merit to consider sampling rates.
Thanks for the comment. It’s a good point about social media, if that’s your place then no real need to drizzle. I don’t print enough, but really should.
I’m about to start my first mosaic project tonight- a 3x4 mosaic covering Rho Ophiuchi and the Blue Horsehead with 3 hours on each panel. I hope that is not too ambitious and also that 15% overlap is enough. I saw that you mentioned cropping out the dithering edges before merging. I will end up with over 1,500 sub exposures, so how would I do that without manually loading up each one to crop? That sounds extremely tedious no matter what. I don’t have PixInsight, so I use DeepSkyStacker and Photoshop.
Excerllent. However, at many places you went too fast and the cursor also moved too fast to know what you clicked as you did not announce what you clicking. Hope you can make another video for dummies like me. I have made notes of your video, but right now I am stuck at DynamicBackGroundExtraction, as how how to remove some of the Squares, when I click on the white Square, it turns Green, but now how do I delete it ? also at around 5 min mark, when you finish HistogramTransformation, you say "close that down, close that down", the cursor moves so fast cannot make out what you closing, also you don't speak out the name of what you closing. So stuck here also.
And what camera? One shot colour? Or did you use a filter wheel? I can’t get those nice colours. And how did you edit? How many stacks? Exposure times? Thanks.
Great vid. A good addition to Seestar lunar imaging is a filter holder with a 2 inch neutral density filter so you can even out the surface brightness without creating dark spots on the terminator. I got a set of 3 filters of different filtering intensities. The set with a lined case to hold them cost $30 on Amazon.
