First try at Antares Region

[JimFox]

So this is my first shot at Antares Region and only my 3rd time out using the SkyGuider Pro to capture Deep Space Objects. I felt much more comfortable each time I go out, especially with trying to find these Deep Space Objects. Since my gear is as basic as it gets, I can't just push a button to guide my camera to where I want to shoot, I actually have to look through my camera and try to find what is often like a needle in a haystack. So I have been happy to begin to start finding more needles!

I had stumbled across the Anteras Region on my star app on my phone at the end of attempt #2 a few weeks back. I was drawn to all of it's coloring and thought it would be cool if I could capture it.

What I am finding out in my DSO Journey is that the Astro Capture process I have pretty well nailed down already and feel pretty comfortable. But the Post Processing of the DSO is where I feel like a PreSchooler trying to read Shakespeare as I told Tony. Where as everything processed nicely my 2nd time out, this 3rd time I struggled greatly. I started with wanting to process the Rosette Nebula, and struggled greatly for hours and hours today trying to get it to look good. So I decided for the sake of my hair to shelve that for now, and went to the next Object I had shot after the Rosette and that was this Anteras Region.

I don't care for posting something that someone else has already posted. But the Anteras Region came out at least halfway decent and I wanted something to post for my troubles...

For the record I think Tony's version that he posted a few days ago is much superior to mine. https://www.focalworld.com/index.php?threads/antares-region.11906/#post-98383 His colors and locations seem so much more in line with the textbook view of the Antares Region then mine. But to document my journey, after as many excuses as I could think to write about, here is my version.

I used:
38 images at 60 secs
12 Dark Frames
Shot with the Nikon D850 and Tamron 150-600mm at 150mm

All comments are welcome,

Jim

 

[Tony Liu]

Good effort for only the 3rd time out with the tracker Jim! My advice is getting more data; nothing wrong with 60 sec subs but 38 of them (therefore only 38 min total integration time) to be is not quite enough. If you can aim for at least 2 hours (and more the merrier). I would also get at least 20 dark frames and make sure you shoot your bias and flat frames as well.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Wow this seems like a lot of work in the cold night. Good perseverance Jim. It looks great to my eyes.

 

[AlanLichty]

Not at all sure why you are concerned about your hair with the processing here

I would be every bit as lost as you are in trying to integrate this many captures into an image. Interesting to watch your journey into DSO as subjects.

 

[Douglas Sherman]

WOW!! That is a lot of work and very nice work, Jim. You have convinced me to abandon any ideas of doing deep space photography. I'm too old and its too cold to spend most of the night outside. The nice thing is that I can enjoy your images and the others on this site.

 

[Amy Nelson]

Wow this seems like a lot of work in the cold night. Good perseverance Jim. It looks great to my eyes.

I would have to agree with you Ben!

 

[Amy Nelson]

Looks great to me too!

 

[JimFox]

Good effort for only the 3rd time out with the tracker Jim! My advice is getting more data; nothing wrong with 60 sec subs but 38 of them (therefore only 38 min total integration time) to be is not quite enough. If you can aim for at least 2 hours (and more the merrier). I would also get at least 20 dark frames and make sure you shoot your bias and flat frames as well.

Thanks so much Tony! And thanks for your help behind the scenes too.

My goal next week will be to get 2 or 3 hours on an object next time.

 

[Colorado CJ]

Excellent!

Very colorful and a huge amount of stars. Looks like you are getting the hang of astrophotography quickly.

As you are finding out, editing astro images is pretty challenging. I am still learning new tricks with each image.

So, are you getting hooked yet?

 

[JimFox]

Wow this seems like a lot of work in the cold night. Good perseverance Jim. It looks great to my eyes.

Thank you Ben. This was the reward I think for struggling with some of the other Nebulas, I sure was happy with how this turned out.

 

[JimFox]

Not at all sure why you are concerned about your hair with the processing here

I would be every bit as lost as you are in trying to integrate this many captures into an image. Interesting to watch your journey into DSO as subjects.

Ha ha, now that's so true about my hair!

To keep the terminology clear here as others might look at some of these threads and try to learn from my mistakes or struggles. The integration process was really easy as the DeepSkyStacker does all the work, all I have to do is sit there and drum my fingers on the desk while it does it's thing. Where I am lacking is having enough hours of photos to actually stack, and that will improve. I am still in the Kid in the Candy store phase and seeing what looks good, what I can find with my non guiding very basic system. That's improved a lot. I shot 9 different Objects on Tuesday night trying to see if I can find things. On Wednesday night I only shot 4 different objects. I will go back out again I think this coming Tuesday, and I will pick out 3 objects with the intent to shoot 3 hours of data on each of those 3. I will probably pick 2 that I have already had some good success to see if I can build on it, and then I will pick one I really struggled with in processing to see if the more data will help solve my issues.

So thanks for following on this journey, it's really quite fun to be shooting something different like this. I am not bored in the least with Landscapes, but it still is really fun to be mixing in the Deep Space Astro now.

 

[JimFox]

Excellent!

Very colorful and a huge amount of stars. Looks like you are getting the hang of astrophotography quickly.

As you are finding out, editing astro images is pretty challenging. I am still learning new tricks with each image.

So, are you getting hooked yet?

I am getting just a little hooked...

It's really fun, partly because it's different so I enjoy the challenge. And partly because the end product looks so cool!

At some point I know I will upgrade to a system that can guide to objects, and probably a faster lens. But for now I am really enjoying more about the night sky, and learning to actually find these objects by myself. My work at this stage will not even come close to comparing what you are able to produce, but considering all I have spent is $500, I am really pleased with where I am at this point.

 

[JimFox]

WOW!! That is a lot of work and very nice work, Jim. You have convinced me to abandon any ideas of doing deep space photography. I'm too old and its too cold to spend most of the night outside. The nice thing is that I can enjoy your images and the others on this site.

Thank you Doug for your kind comments!

Don't abandon your idea's just because I am a glutton for punishment. You guys should know by now that I am very odd about my ability to stay up for days on end. I think you still could do it. Just wait for it to warm up a bit more. I would be interested to see what objects you can see from your backyard. Maybe it's something you could set up there? You don't have access to whole sky from your backyard, but you do have quite a nice view. Use one of the sky apps and see what you can see. If you could shoot from your patio, now that would so cool!

 

[Mike Lewis]

Jim,

Really great results for starting out - and one of the most special areas of the sky for sure too, so that helps.

A couple of comments:

1) You can forget only posting stuff that no one else has posted. Just on our little low traffic astro forum this has been posted now at least 3 times, and I think actually 4. There is a reason that many of these objects are famous to shoot - because they are relatively bright, and in thi8s case, very colorful.

2) You did a great job with your camera, but the missing red signal that relates to Hydrogen-alpha is being blocked by your filter in the camera. Any modified DSLR or a dedicated astro camera would have gotten you lots more signal in the red.

3) Once you get past the point of pointing well enough and tracking well enough (as you are demonstrating here) it becomes about 4 things, IMHO:

- How dark is your sky?
- How optically fast is your optic?
- How long did you collect data?
- How much time and effort did you put into the post-processing.

You can continue to decide that you don't want to go down a rabbit hole on the last item, but eventually, if you want to really get the best out of your data, you need to realize that the post processing has at least as much to do with the final outcome as the data collection does. As I said on the phone, many of my objects do not even show up in the individual subframes, and only show up in the final stack after dark subtraction, stacking and stretching.

Great result though - I was about at year 4 or 5 to really get results I would have liked as much as this image!

ML

 

[Alisa]

so cool!

 

[JimFox]

Jim,

Really great results for starting out - and one of the most special areas of the sky for sure too, so that helps.

A couple of comments:

1) You can forget only posting stuff that no one else has posted. Just on our little low traffic astro forum this has been posted now at least 3 times, and I think actually 4. There is a reason that many of these objects are famous to shoot - because they are relatively bright, and in thi8s case, very colorful.

2) You did a great job with your camera, but the missing red signal that relates to Hydrogen-alpha is being blocked by your filter in the camera. Any modified DSLR or a dedicated astro camera would have gotten you lots more signal in the red.

3) Once you get past the point of pointing well enough and tracking well enough (as you are demonstrating here) it becomes about 4 things, IMHO:

- How dark is your sky?
- How optically fast is your optic?
- How long did you collect data?
- How much time and effort did you put into the post-processing.

You can continue to decide that you don't want to go down a rabbit hole on the last item, but eventually, if you want to really get the best out of your data, you need to realize that the post processing has at least as much to do with the final outcome as the data collection does. As I said on the phone, many of my objects do not even show up in the individual subframes, and only show up in the final stack after dark subtraction, stacking and stretching.

Great result though - I was about at year 4 or 5 to really get results I would have liked as much as this image!

ML

Thanks Mike for your thoughts! You have been an awesome help and resource.

I won't be buying any gear at the moment, so of your list that leaves me to just getting more data to crunch. I am still in the kind of experimental stage so I have been trying lot's of things. I do plan on going out Tuesday night to shoot again, and I should be able to shoot 3 different objects at 3 hours a piece. From what I have been reading and seeing even if I could shoot for longer it seems to be lot's of Astro guys are in the 2 to 3 hour range of images to stack. I will shoot for 3 hours. So that should improve my signal by a lot since so far I have been stacking from 20 mins to 40 mins max. So I can't wait to see the difference.

One of my take aways though is now that I have shot a bunch of things, I am going to have a consistent Focal Length and Exposure for what I am shooting. That should make stacking easier if I use data from multiple nights.

As for processing, I have never thought of processing as going down a rabbit hole. I guess that's a bad thing? Anyway, if you know much about me you know I have always spent hours and hours on processing as I am perfectionist. So my typical landscape photo could easily take me at a minimum of 8 hours to process and sometimes double that. I am very meticulous. So I believe I already stated it here that one of the things I found out after the first or 2nd night when I had images I could process is that the Post Processing is way more work then setting up and shooting. Now that I have it down how to shoot, and I am getting down where things are in the sky and how to find them manually since I don't have guide scope capabilities, the one thing that got impressed on me and I think I shared it is that Post Processing is like 90% of the work of Astro. And fortunately I Love to Post Process. Some people don't enjoy it, but maybe because I grew up with a real chemical dark room, having our digital darkroom today is just as much a joy to me as it was when I was mixing chemicals. Since yesterday I have been processing the California Nebula. I have restarted processing on it 8 times now until I have finally gotten it looking good to my eyes. Now some of it is that although there are tutorials and guides out there on processing Astro photos, a lot of it just the person's own skill. I appreciate getting pointed in the right direction, but it's still up to the person to now integrate all of that knowledge into practical processing. So the California Nebula has been fun, because I have been learning a lot as keep starting over as I find I didn't really like aspects of it, and the majority of those issues were with dealing with the stars. When I post my California Nebula, I will post a before processing, straight out of the stacker image and my finished image so that people who are just along for the ride watching me learn astro can see just what a pain stars can be.

So if post processing is going to take me down a rabbit hole, I guess I will be eating more carrots.

And again, thanks for your help Mike. It's been great to have you as a sounding board as I am taking these baby steps.