Off-Nominal - 133 - I’m an Adult with a Job

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by photographer Andrew McCarthy to talk about his journey into astrophotography, his process, and let’s be real, to gawk at his work. And also to convince Jake to buy telescopes.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 133 - I’m an Adult with a Job (with Andrew McCarthy) - YouTubePixInsight — Pleiades AstrophotoDeepSkyStacker - PresentationAstrospheric2024 Cosmic Calendar (Includes free wallpaper bundle) – CosmicBackgroundFollow AndrewAndrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) / XCosmic Background Photography – CosmicBackgroundFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, everybody. I don't know if Jake is here on the show yet, because he just gave me a thumbs up right before he went live, and it triggered fireworks on his Mac and crashed his camera. And you're very laggy now, and here we are live. But so, Jake's in some sort of situation. I'm going to power cycle.

Yeah, you power cycle. I'll introduce our guest today. Andrew McCarthy, how's it going? Welcome to the show. Yes, please do. Hi. Thanks so much for having me. on here. I'm excited to talk with you guys.

We have been low-key, not low-key, we've just been loving your photography and creeping on your work for so long. And we're like, man, we really got to, when did we recently start talking about it again, Jake? Probably the epic, I know what picture it was. I'm just

going to just tease everyone with the most epic picture of all time. The ISS and the moon in the most sci-fi scene that I've seen in my life. And we were like, man, we really got to have Andrew on the show to talk about it. Yeah, that picture sold it right there. Well, it was that. And Jake was like, I really want to get into astro photography.

I've always thought about it. And I am in now, he used to live in Vancouver and now he lives in a less cloudy place. And so you're here to help him, to convince him to spend a lot of money. I'll do what I can. I appreciate it. Jake, while your camera works. Did you bring anything fun to drink today? I did.

I got a story and everything today, all right? Wow. Yeah, so, okay, so today is November 30th, which, so in, here in, in Yucatan, the Day of the Dead stuff is like a little different than the rest of Mexico. So they're like, it's more tightly integrated with like the Mesoamerican stuff here. So in the Maya, I have this holiday called Hanal Tishan. and so it starts November 1st and it ends today

today so it's like a month long kind of thing that they do so today is when all the spirits that all your ancestors came back to visit you and now they're going home on the last day of Hanal Pishan is on Bishmesh they call it so anyway so Coco is a lie

Coco is a single day storyline and that's a lie well it's more more properly like Dia de Mertos right but so this is Hanal you know Hanal Pishan is the name of the holiday here and this is a local A little effrenda. That's great.

Yeah, with a little effrenda with a beer on top of it, right? How cool is that? So, yeah, this is what I got here. And it's a, it's a, do you see that what kind of beer it is there? Do you see that? No, it's very blurry. A pumpkin ale. A stilo pumpkin.

You know I love it. All right. So, cheers, yeah. Andrew, I know you've got something cool over there. Yeah, I got poured myself some scotch. We'll see. I've been recovering from the flu, so I have. and had any alcohol inside me for a while.

So this might hit me. You're like really hard. Another week, yeah. If he drops off in the productivity side of things for the next week, you can thank us. We'll see. I've got a, maybe the most fun-named beer that I've had on the show, Jake. I've got a Long John's. Yeah, some yards here in Philly.

Long John's. Look at that. A winter ale. I went out and purchased the, uh, I realized. if you don't jump on the winter beers right away, they go away pretty quick. So I had the pre-purchase three weeks in advance for our off-nominy show, the Mad Elf.

I missed last year's match of Mad Elf, the 14% Christmas cherry beer. So I did buy my six-pack today, and I'll keep it cold for a couple weeks. But Long John's. All right. How good is Long John's? Come on.

We both got hyper-local beers today. This is pretty good. This is a real, really, Andrew's like, what have I gotten into? Yeah. I'm excited to see how the alcohol affects the podcast, actually. I usually don't drink. You're also early, right?

You're in Arizona? Yeah, it's only 2 o'clock here. Yeah. Well, it's right, it's only 2 o'clock because of the daily saving situation. Yeah. That really, what was happening? I'm trying to remember what the storyline was. Oh, when I was out in Arizona in like June, like a couple years ago.

And we were day-tripping up to Page. And so we threw on the navigation and start driving. And we were going to Antelope Canyon and some of the areas around there. And the, like, Google Maps you will arrive at time was pulling the Utah time zone, not the Arizona time zone. So, like, an hour in my drive, I looked down and I was like, Katie, are we in a time warp? Like, we left at the right time, right? What happened between here and there? And then it took us like a couple seconds to be like, oh, this is probably just state line date issues.

So that's always, I'm sure that's fun for you to flip back and forth. Yeah, I just drove up to Utah for that eclipse, the annular eclipse. And I was getting really confused my navigation because it's like my arrival day or my arrival time was like not what I expected it to me. And I was like, am I going to hit traffic? What's going on? And that's the same thought. It's like, man, there must be a real accident because it is, you're like, you're on the one road. It's not like there's a lot of options on how else to get there.

Exactly. We have some, you know, brotherhood in that we're both in places that don't do the daylight savings, which means that we suffer through the terrible thing twice a year where the whole world changes time around us, and we have to figure out what time everything is that. I've kind of come to the idea that not doing daylight savings might actually be harder until everyone else stops doing it too. True. Yeah. This is where the listeners will discover that I'm like the one daylight saving stand in the world.

And I have reason. Don't yell yet. Like, this is my one thing. I'm sitting like a half a mile from where it was invented. So it makes perfect sense exactly where I am, both longitudinally and latitudinally. It works out really well for my timeline. And I realize that that greatly afflicts me as to my opinions on the matter. So, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Ben. All right. Let's talk about some master photography, Jake. Let's start spending your money. All right. Andrew, I think it would be fun to hear an origin story for people that don't know what you're up to today,

maybe hear about what you're working on. But I'd love to hear about how you got started in it and your journey into the photography that you do. Well, it was kind of on accident, actually, that I discovered this. You know, growing up, I was always a little bit of a nerd. my dad actually had a telescope. They'd let me look through. So I saw the planets, you know, just visually through his telescope growing up.

And that was probably a huge influence on me. And I was just like a huge trekkie. I was like watching Star Trek all the time. All of my toys were like Star Trek. So I obviously was like kind of rooted in me from a young age. I didn't really think about it too much until, like, I think it was just, it was like on a whim. I was just thinking fondly back to looking through my dad's telescope. and I was like, why don't I just buy myself a telescope?

I'm an adult with a job. I can afford this. And I bought a, I think it was about $600. It was this 10-inched obsonian telescope. Very, very simple type of telescope. It's basically just like a big tube with two mirrors in it. Yeah, big one, 10.H. It's the easiest thing in the world to use.

And I set this thing up and I put it in my backyard, and I just pointed it at the first bright-ish object I saw which happened to be Jupiter. So a little bit of luck there that it happened to be like just perfectly situated south over my backyard when I got this thing set up. And I looked there and immediately, I'm just like, oh, my God, it's Jupiter. This is amazing. And tried to take a photo through my smartphone.

I think I had like an iPhone 6 or whatever it was at the time. And the pictures turned out like absolutely terrible. But it's like so bright compared to like the blackness of space. around it that your camera just doesn't know how to focus on it because it's just like so outside of the types of things that they're designed to take photos of. So I spent like just a ton of time just trying to see if I can just figure it out, you know, just using like my phones like, you know, you touched on the bright spot and trying to like really focus.

Oh, I kind of just did not exactly over the eyepiece anymore. Like the aperture sliding with your finger. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't really work. too well with a smartphone. You can, you can actually, with modern smartphones, there's a lot more controls on them now. And, you know, some of them are actually able to do a decent job with astrophotography, but what I had just was not working. So I spent, like, all this time, like, just went down

this, like, rabbit hole of research and discovered that, like, amateur astrophotography was a thing. Like, I didn't even know it was a thing. Like, I knew, obviously, like, astronomy was a thing that you could do from your backyard, like, but I just assumed that, like, to take pictures you needed, like, space telescope or something. I didn't really, I didn't really, I guess, understand how accessible this stuff was. So I, you know,

I stumbled across like the, there's like a whole community on Reddit, the Asthma Photography community on Reddit. And all these people take photos and nebulas and galaxies from the backyard. I'm like, how the heck do you do this? And I, you know,

I spent just tons of time just like pouring over like, people like, you know, share kind of the details of how they capture their image. There's like, I was like, what the heck is an equator? amount. And basically, that's like the key to astrophotography is figuring out a way to cancel out the rotation of the earth. Because if you're trying to do a long exposure on something faint that's up there, like galaxies, nebulas, they're very faint. You have to do a really long exposure to see them at all.

But when you do that, the stars and stuff all streak across the sky and your photo looks terrible and blurry. So an equatorial mount was kind of like the foundation of astrophotography because it allows you to compensate for Earth's motion and basically just freeze whatever you're pointing at so you can do a long exposure. So you can do exposures of many, many, many hours, hundreds of hours if you wanted to, and just accumulate the photons that are being collected by your telescope over a period of several nights. And that's how you get these really amazing photos of nebulous and galaxies. So, you know, figuring that out, I bought some equipment and kind of just started started to take some photos that was finally proud of.

And that was, that would have been like maybe early 2019, when I first bought my equatorial mount and kind of got into this. And it's just been just every time, just for trying to get a little bit further, a little more detail,

a little deeper into space. That's just kind of been my journey. 2019, you were a couple months later, this is a hobby onset, you were shit out of luck. There was no telescopes to buy if you were like just a little later than you were.

So good timing on that one. Yeah, that's true. After the pandemic, it got really hard to buy stuff. All the supply chains got disrupted and everybody's bored at home. They're like, I want to get into astrophotography. Drunk in the backyard.

Hey, what if I did stuff up there? Yeah, that's how it goes. Yeah. So you were like digging the planetary stuff with the Dobsonian. and but were you like when did you start thinking about nebulous was it was it the subreddit or were you always like i don't know i'm more of a planet sky myself and my interest in looking through but telescopes

but i know there's people that are like i only like deep space objects what did you have a particular thing or were you just like i don't know see where i see where my interests fall i'm kind of interested in all of it i don't really have like a like a preference um there's i'm just you're really limited by the atmosphere when it comes to planets. So I really can only shoot planets when the atmospheric turbulence at a minimum, the seeing conditions are really good. Otherwise, everything just looks blurry. So when conditions are good, it's incredible.

You know, it's like I can get these like really nice, crisp images of planets with, you know, I can even resolve details on the moons of Jupiter, which I thought was impossible, you know, very recently, like a few years ago, I would have thought it was impossible. to resolve details on Ganimy, for example. But I can do that. I can do that with my equipment when the conditions are really good. Now, when conditions aren't as good, and you're, like, nebulous and galaxies are, like, really big from like an angular-sized

standpoint. Like, I think most people actually don't have a frame reference for this, but you don't really need a lot of magnification to see nebulous. Like, most of the nebulous I photograph are, like, way bigger than the moon in the sky. just to like, you know, blow some minds of people that are listening. If they were brighter, there would be, like, really huge in the sky, like, just these massive things that you could easily see with your naked eye if they're a brighter. The problem is they're just very faint, of course.

So I don't need, like, really good, steady conditions to shoot those and have them have the photos look good. I just need clear skies. I live in Arizona, though, so plenty of clear skies here. Yeah, it's a specialty. something. But I find nebulas to me are the most fun to photograph because interesting thing about nebulas, they're almost all red. So like emission nebulas, they're like all like this kind of uniform red. It's like this very, very distinct color. It's a hydrogen alpha emission line. Basically,

you got hydrogen that's being ionized by starlight and it glows fluorescent. And it makes all nebula is red. There's also, of course, blue nebula that's caused by really scattering, very similar to why our sky is blue. But because of like, there's, they're like so, they're overwhelmingly hydrogen. You can get really creative with color balancing out the hydrogen and resolve other things in there. You know, there's, I capture in multiple emission lines. I'm capturing sulfur. I'm capturing oxygen. I'm capturing hydrogen. And I color balance them to where I can bring out these other things in there. You know, there's, I capture and multiple emission lines. I'm capturing sulfur. I'm capturing oxygen. I'm capturing hydrogen. And I color balance them to where I can bring out these other. I elements and the nebula is no longer red in the photography and because of that I really love nebula photography because it allows gives you more creative control over how you're actually photographing it because you're not ending up with the same photo as everybody else just depending on your discretion how much of those other fainter emission lines you want to pull out of the nebula so you end up like really like vivid like colorful photos and and it's like entirely almost

your discretion at how much you bring bringing this out for that reason and I find that each nebula photo is almost like it's a little work of art in itself. And it's less about the mathematics of how do you capture this accurately? And like with planets, there isn't really any discretion. It's like you shoot it. It's exactly how the planet looks and how good the photo is really just comes down to how good of your conditions and how good is your execution. Nebulas aren't really like that.

There's all these different ways that you can adjust your color palettes and bring out different things in the nebula. It's like, yeah, this photo you have up with the Orion Nebula, that looks different than every other photo of the Orion Nebula you'll see because it's uniquely mine. And it's just, it's almost like I'm painting with photons, which is incredible. This isn't unreal. Like, the detail is just crazy. It's wild.

I get lost looking at these kind of picks, just how much is going on. Nebula always blow my mind because, like, so you talk about how big they are, like, from an angular perspective, but just from an absolute perspective as well, like, these look like clouds, but they're, this is such a large space that if you were in the middle of it, you wouldn't know because all the little pieces of that nebula are so far apart. Like, that's how big of a thing this is. You wouldn't know you were in it. It would just be empty space. That's wild to me to think about. And it looks like that. And it looks like that.

Yeah, man, this feels like I'm in a college dorm again. This is great. This is like, what is in your old friend over there, Jake? I just kind of tell you, hold on, hold on. I'm just going to tell you a little bit above this nebula. Yeah. What's crazy, this one is so bright, too, that you can actually capture it with just a smartphone, no telescope. You can literally just hold up your cell phone, take a long exposure of, like, that part of the Orion.

and you can see the nebula because it's just it's bright it's it's bright and it's big and it's it's right there um so this is like number one for amateur targets yeah yeah anybody if you have a dsLR and a tripod you can get a photo of this nebula like easy what's your favorite nebula what's your power ranking um it's usually whichever one i'm working on at the time everyone's closest to what you're interested in yeah yeah it's like so so so ryan is probably my favorite because I keep coming back to it. And depending on your skill level, it kind of covers like every skill level.

Like, you know, when I was first starting out, I could get a photo of it that was happy with. And now as I approach it with like new expertise and I shoot it again, I'm able to get more out of it, like more details that I wasn't able to resolve and I was more of an amateur. So it's like it kind of, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

of the photographer, which makes it a really fun object to shoot. And there's always more to discover, like, you know, little, little knots, tangled knots of gases and little star clusters that you just, that you see, that you didn't see the last time. You know, each, there's always something new to discover in these photos. So, yeah, that's definitely one of my favorite nebulas. Really big fan of the lagoon nebula, too. It's just, there's something about that one that's just like,

it's just the gift that keeps on giving. Yeah, look it up. It's beautiful. I have lots of photos of it. And actually, I think all of my photos of Lagoon Nebula, actually, maybe with the exception of one, are actually true color. So that Orion Nebula photos false color,

because it was captured using narrow band filters that don't accurately translate into RGB. So there's like a color palette shift, which is the best way I can describe. It's not like people say, oh, the colors are all fake, It's not exactly the way it works. It's more like a trick of the color balancing,

what you use to resolve some of the faint or emission lines. But the lagoon nebula is like, oh yeah, there again, you found one. Very vivid, like, pinks and like the core is blue because there's reflection nebula within the core. And the starlight, in addition to ionizing the hydrogen gas, it's also reflecting off of just like, faint gases and dusts, which scatters the same way

it does when enters our atmosphere. So you get this blue core to it because of the reflection nebula. So yeah, absolutely stunning nebula. It's very bright, too. Like, you can actually see it with your naked eye. I pick it out. It's one of my favorite things to like pick out with binoculars. Oh, hey, look, that's one of my first photos of that nebula ever.

Yeah, I was just going to say. I would love to talk about this a little bit. Like, given what you were talking about with Orion, you know, starting here, started out here. Now, here like um yeah what's like talk about the progression and in a target like this is it is it you know upgrading your techniques and understanding how to capture this stuff better but also figuring out which pieces to capture more like that like that's that's part of what you're talking about with how big these nebula are that you can you can probably figure out like oh actually

the the cool part is i thought the cool part was the whole thing the cool part is this part over in this area i i honestly think it's all cool like it there no matter like what part you're photographing. Like there's so much to explore and discover in every nebula. So this particular one, so the main difference between those two photos is the acquisition time that went into capturing it. The first one, or like the older one, I captured that in like, it must be like 2018 or something. It was like right when I got started. That's, that is a single 30 second exposure captured using a 10-inch telescope. I couldn't, I couldn't figure out how to get my photos to stack very,

very consistently. And stacking, stacking photos is really key to doing very long exposures on them because you're not just going to do like one like 10 hour exposure. If doing that, it would just blow out the sensor on your camera and it would just be white and noisy, and

it just wouldn't look very good. The trick is doing a lot of sub-exposures and then stacking them together and you actually get this, you you're able to gather the same amount of photons if you were just leave your shutter open, but you're not blowing out your sensor. So the problem with this original image is that you see, the stars are so big and bloated

and white. It's called, they're oversaturated, basically what it means. But because of that, the stacking algorithms couldn't actually align and stack my individual subframes. And I didn't know why at the time. And I was like, yeah, whatever. I still got a photo of a nebula. It's still cool.

Yeah. But now, of course. Yeah. Wow. Look at you. You really know what's going on. Yeah. It's still cool.

It's amazing. You're looking at a stellar nursery right there. And you're seeing some of the ionization of the hydrogen in there. So you can see like that, this hints of pink and blues. That was straight out of camera. I didn't like process that or anything. Like it's just how it looked. But when you start stacking photos and you capture, you know,

hundreds of photos over a period of like eight to 12 hours. And you stack them all together using software. And you can then extract. even faint or dust and all these other things going on inside that nebula that you can't really capture normally because they're kind of outside the dynamic range capabilities of the camera. If you have a very bright core of a nebula and like these faint like outer wispy stuff, it's like you can't you literally can't capture them in a single photograph because of just the dynamic range limitations.

So a stacking photos increases your dynamic range a lot. So what kind of software do you use to do? that with like I'm curious about what the and is there is how manual is it or do you have some sort of automated kind of pipeline set up to do all this kind of thing so for for an image like that I would use picks insight most likely picks insight is a very specialized astronomy software and it's got all the tools you need to stack an image and then process process out whatever you need so deep sky stacker is like a very free version that like most people start with where you can just plug in your raw frames, calibration frames, and then it'll spit out a stacked image. That image would look

pretty terrible. Like it's very unprocessed. It's very raw still. But it would get view like this 32-bit tip file that you can then import into Photoshop or something. And then you can bring out everything that's hidden in that in the data of that image. Really, most, the bulk of astrophotography processing just comes down to stretching the image where you get an image that almost looks like it's completely black with just like a few stars in it and then you brighten it up until you see

the deep space object within it and most of the processing just comes down to doing that process correctly. But you can do pretty much everything for yourself. What's this free one called again? I'm like Googling all these things at the same time. Deep Sky Stacker. I got the, I'm putting the links in the show notes for everybody.

Okay, good. Deep SkyStacker. I'm going to have a links in the show notes and a shopping list for Jake. So it's going to be great. DeepSkystacker. Dot free.Fr. Is that the right website? I think it is. I think, yeah, that sounds right.

I mean, does that domain, like, not shout legitimacy to you, Jake? Or what? What's your problem with dot free.fr? You know? Just go to deep skystacker. Dot totally not a virus. Are you? PayPal.

Anthony. I'll send your copy. I've put it on every single one of my computer, so hopefully it's not a virus. You're dedecing the whole internet right now, but you've got great photos, so, you know. Horse head. I'm a horse head guy.

Horse head is what's up. I love me some horse head. Horse head is extremely cool. Look at this, Jake. Yeah, I love it. It's really good. The colors on these are. very cool. I like these.

And that's true color. The horset nebula is like, you know, it's very vivid red. And you've got these reflection nebula in there. So they're glowing blue from the relay scattering from starlight bouncing off the dust.

But there's so many like little pockets in this image that just, I don't know. It's the way that gases get sculpted by the insane physics within nebula, like you don't see these shapes anywhere else in nature. That's crazy stuff.

These like, I don't know, these like towering columns, like that's a couple light years tall. Right. Yeah. They're huge. They're huge. They're like,

they would work our entire solar system. It reminds me like this, this scene of nebula always reminds me of like when you go, when you go to the beach and it's sunset and the sun is just right. And you can see the tops of the clouds

that are over the horizon, and they're just kind of, like, weird perspective on it because you know that it's like a giant cloud, but it's just right there, and it's just the top, and it looks really cool, and it's illuminated strangely, and it doesn't make any sense with the rest of the sky, and it's just like you're peering over into another part of the world in a very cool way, and I love those little, like, wispy bits, because it probably looks as cool as a horse head, but, you know, from a different angle, and from our angle, it's like, what is that peeking through right there, and what's going on on that side of the nebula? Yeah, yeah.

That's so good. So what do you do from like a camera perspective? Like are you just grabbing like any old DSLR and just like mounting it into a telescope somehow? Or is there like kind of a special camera that you would use for something like this? So you can use a DSLR. I do use DSLRs for some stuff. I use like this. I have a Sony A72 right here that I use for a lot of stuff.

And then somewhere, I don't know. I put it. There's a there's a 60 over here that I use sometimes too. Um, the 6D, um, is astromodded. So the, the challenge with DSLRs for astrophotography, um, is nebulas are actually very, very, very close to infrared light. Um, they, the hydrogen alpha emission line is very close. And as a result, the signal actually gets clipped by the built in UVIR filters that are inside your DSLR. Um, because of that, it actually like you can't get a true nebula or sorry a true color nebula photo using a DSLR because you're clipping too much of that red signal. Is that like red eye filter? Is that the same thing that they're going to plug out? No. The red eye. Red eye just isn't it just like a flash

to get your cue. It's a flash hitting the back of your. Oh yeah. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. If you, the way to eliminate red eyes look at the flash rather than the lens and it will never reflect right back to the lens. Pro tip. for everybody out there. Brilliant. Or just have red eye reduction where it dilates your people. Or yeah, or just

or close your eyes and just blinking every photo. I just never have my photo taken. That's how I get around it. So anyways, yes, while I do use DSLRs, I actually use very special astronomy cameras for most of my stuff.

Like this one right here is called a 224 MC. It's funny. I actually have a lens on it right now, but usually you don't. have a lens on these cameras. But it looks like I just took the lens off. And you can see layers like just a little tiny sensor in there. And all these cameras are basically is like a sensor with like some very basic electronics

and a heat sink. And they feed the photo data directly into a PC. So you're able to download the data directly to your computer into whatever capture software you're running. The reason they're designed like this, for one, so much of what's in these photos or sorry in these cameras is actually like processing software that you don't want you know there's the moment you take a photo using a DSLR it kind of runs through a lot of processing already like it goes through noise reduction it goes through color balancing

it does all these things when you're doing astrophotography you want that the the photo be as a raw as possible because you're going to be stacking it you need to really preserve that source data as good as you can't. So if the camera's doing any kind of processing on it, it's going to corrupt that image in a way you don't want. So yes, definitely you need to be shooting raw. And when you're using a telescope, you also like really want to pay close attention to your pixel scale.

So there's this relationship between the size of your pixels and the light that's coming in to them. So you can look at your focal ratio of your telescope, and actually choose a camera with the appropriate pixel size based on that. Otherwise, if your pixels are too small, you could oversample the image, and it actually takes you longer to record an image because the pixels are so small that they're almost like, if you think of a pixel on a camera sensor is like a bucket, collecting photons, if the bucket is too small, it gets really hard to capture a photo of something that's very faint.

So the ideal pixel size can be dependent on the telescope and the nature of the light going in it. So I actually use completely different cameras designed very differently for deep sky photos versus for like the moon, the sun, and planets. Because they have very different requirements based on the telescope. So what's the one that you had, I think, is the deep sky go-to, right, that 224 MC? This is actually a planetary. I actually don't use this one very much anymore. It's just a little bit older now, and the newer ones are a little better. But it's still a great camera to start with because it's pretty cheap.

I think it was like $200. And it's actually pretty good. I'm even cheaper now. I think it's red now. So that's fun. And it's $149. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's, I think they're having a sale right now.

Nice. So, yeah. Jake. But this is a good. I'm sending a C-Dry right now, Jake. Yeah. It is surprising. It's just very simple. It's a very, very small sensor. It's like the size of a sensor and like a cell phone. It's like very, very small. This is really just designed for planets because with planets, you don't need to capture all the empty space around the planet. You just need capture the planet itself. So you're cropping really tightly around it in the field of view, your telescope. And then because it's such a small sensor, you can take photos like hundreds of photos per second, which is very necessary when you want to use lucky imaging, which is necessary when you take planet photos.

Go on about lucky imaging. It kind of makes sense, though, just because, like, if you think about, oh, cameras must be so expensive, but you're, like, outsourcing the lens cost to the telescope and the processing cost to the computer. So, like, what else? There aren't many jobs left for the camera to do at that point. It's being used to hold up my Lego ISS right now, but I actually have a really expensive deep space camera right here. So it's like they can get very expensive. like a $5,000 camera and I just I use it as a like a paper right now but I can but yeah

you can you can actually spend a lot of money on the cameras still um you because when you get into a very large sensor and because there are you know when you're shooting deep space you still want a large sensor for that because you want to see a wider field of view they need with planets um and you there's a lot of technology that actually just goes into keeping the sensor cool Like there's thermal electric cooling that goes under the back of these things to keep the sensors cold as possible. So you can do like these 10-minute exposures without the camera like picking up its own heat signature as noise. So yeah, tons of technology and getting these cameras like just really, really optimized for deep space work. I've got a similar one right now on my observatory that's that I use for nebulous and galaxies.

You were talking about lucky imaging. Is that like taking a bunch of shots and hoping that. you get one that doesn't have as much atmospheric disturbance as the others. Is that what you're referencing there? Yeah, basically you just take thousands of photos of the planet or whatever you're doing, like a very tight crop of the moon, for example. And you run it through the software, which automatically sorts and stacks the photos. So you can say, like, I want to keep the best 30% of these like 10,000 photos I'm feeding you. And it will analyze them and then spit out this like stacked photo of the best 30%.

So it's lucky imaging. I think lucky imaging is actually a bit of a misnomer because you're kind of just... Unlucky imaging. Get all the planes out of this and give me just the ones of the moon. Well, it's because you're going to

you're going to actually see like a probability curve of like the amount of photos that are crappy and the amount of photos that are good depending on your condition. So it's like it's not really lucky. It's more like you're just making your own luck by making as many photos as possible. Statistical imaging. Yeah, that'd almost be a better way to put it.

Astrophotography by attrition, yeah. Yeah, really, though, you're kind of brute forcing your way into a photo because you can't count on the atmosphere being consistent for very long. And the other thing that these do when you're stacking so many thousands of photos is it makes the signal-to-noise ratio extremely good. And when the signal-to-noise ratio is really good, you can sharpen the image without introducing noise. So any kind of photo editor or any kind of photographers

Always like you play around with a sharpening slider on Photoshop And it's like you go too far in one direction and all this noise shows up Well if you're if you're signal to noise or it was very very high in the raw photo You can there's basically like no limit to how much you can sharpen it So you just like keep pushing that slider over and it's interesting it's actually mathematically resolving Details that are not visible in the raw photo So you're, because it's, it all, it comes down to just very accurate gradient removal. There's like these like gradients around, around sharp points.

It's, it's the word for is called a point spread function where you have a point and then there's kind of this drop off where it gets blurry. And that's based on just a combination of things, like maybe your optics, the atmosphere. But you can actually mathematically subtract that point spread function. and mathematically resolve details in things that are very, very, very, very small, like, for example, moons of Jupiter. You would never see, like, details in the moons of Jupiter in a raw photo, but you can resolve them with the sharpening.

And it's a very mathematical process, and it's very, very accurate. So you're resolving real details by running through the sharpening. That's wild. How do I get that for my Instagram photos? I'm really sharpening. I mean, they've got AI sharpening too, which does the same thing but with fake details. Yeah, it makes it up. Yeah, it's like, oh, this photo is blurry here.

I'm going to add blades of grass that weren't in there before and like new hairs on your head. Generative fill the rest of the galaxy. Yeah, yeah. Add the horse head nebula to this black photo. Hubble Deepfield was the original generative fill, though. make up what should be in this hole All right So Jake's going to spend a bunch of money on

Well Jake What are you if you had to spend a bunch of money right now Are you going to buy planetary focus stuff first Or deep sky stuff? I mean probably planets to start with right A because I think planets are probably easier Yell at me if I'm wrong Andrew says no

I think I feel like it's easier. I don't know. It takes the artistic variable out, which for some that would be easier though, right? Because like you're saying is you're,

your nebula photography, you're making a lot of creative decisions around what to do with this. With some nebula photography. With narrow band, there's room for interpretation with narrow band nebula photography. But if you're doing like true color, there's actually is a right way to color balance it.

Yeah. Yeah. It really depends on like what, kind of person you are, honestly. Like, if you're like a more than, then yeah, do some like narrow band, nebule photography, you'll have a blast with it. If you're like very like analytical, you're like, oh, no, I want to like know the mathematically right way to do this.

Planetary photography is very much like a, it's a hobby almost discipline. It's everything has to be very well-calamated. You've got a, you've got to time your exposures for in the sky is the steadiest. And there's a, there's a right, objectively correct way to do it. But it is very difficult because, unfortunately, so much is out of your hands and comes down to the atmosphere, which can be really, really frustrating for a Vienna. When you're like, do everything right and the picture still sucks. And you live in the tropics, so. Yeah.

Your video is frozen. So you just look offensive. Oh, you're back. Okay. Wait a minute. You're right on the Gulf of Mexico, aren't you? Yeah, yeah. Okay.

You might actually have really good seeing conditions there because that the Gulf has. actually stabilizes the air really good. Like some of the best seeing in the world is like in Texas because of this. Yeah, it's a little more humid here. So we have that problem, I guess. But, but yeah, I think it's pretty good. I think generally like throughout the year I can go outside and look at a lot of stuff. Like just naked eye, just the amount of stars that I can see in my backyard at night,

especially compared to the places I've lived. Like, it's pretty good. So, yeah. Yeah. So there is a way you can tell if your atmosphere is steady by looking at the stars. too. Because a lot of times that just comes down to light pollution, right? You have too much light pollution. You're not going to see a lot of stars. But when you're looking at your stars, how much they twinkle actually tells you how good your sink conditions are. And you can also tell if you see a lot of plane contrails, which is more applicable during the day if you're doing solar photography. But if there's a lot of plain contrails, your sing is actually going to be worse because the temperature differential between layers of the atmosphere. But humidity is actually really good for stabilizing air. So the ideal condition, planet territory is usually like it's like 70% humidity or something and you want um because like if it if it's too bad then you're just it's basically fog and it'll block too much light from the

planet and it'll you want the planet to be nice and bright still but but yeah the humidity will actually stabilize the atmosphere to stabilize local air currents so you're not getting it all shaky high magnifications okay do you use any of the any tools to like when you're looking at, you know, planning out your week and you're trying to see what nights might have good seeing. Do you use any of the tools? Like, I've used astrospheric in the past, which I tend to like, but I feel like this is probably the super hobbyist level,

free.fR version of whatever thing you use. I'm just curious what tools you're using for, like, forecasting. Also astrosphoric. Yeah, it's basically the same thing. I just find that the seeing forecast isn't particularly accurate to wear a better tool, because there are some other tools out there that some astrophotographers were by. But I found that the seeing forecast in particular is always so badly off that the best gauge

is to go out there with your telescope and just see what it actually looks like. But otherwise, yeah, I just, you know, knowing the cloud forecast. It's a very like, it's a very like, hey, Siri, is it raining outside? I don't know. It's talking to me. It's not. It looks like it's raining. I literally walk outside to see if the stars look extra twinkly. If they look super twinkly, I'm like, I'm not going to bother.

And if they don't look very twinkly, then I go, all right, it might be steadier today. Pull out a telescope. If Jake and I first would say, are there stars? And then they go, yeah, there's stars. All right, great. All right. Are they twinkling? We have an extra point or two in our workflow.

Astroferric is awesome. If anyone's not used it, it's just a nice. Like, for instance, I'm not bringing the telescope anywhere this weekend. It's just all white. So just go do something else. There's nothing to do. You'll notice that it tells you what the ISS is going over ahead, too. Yeah, they did add that.

Yeah, that'll be great that I can see it when it's cloudy. I moved out of the city a year ago, too, so I have that going for me. and then I'm like, there's an extra 20 kilometers between me and the lights, which is pretty nice. So I think I'm in a good spot. I think like it's not a bad place to pick it up, I think. We'll see. I want to talk about two things.

We'll see how broke I am. Before we run out of time. Number one, Jake's trying to get some planetary stuff, which is cool. The next telescope-based purchases I want to make are more around the sun. and your images lately are not helping me with that desire because these are unbelievable to... I don't know if you've seen this one, Jake. Did I show you this one when we were talking?

I don't think so. No, this looks incredible. I am zoomed out right now. This is like unreal. Just scrolling around this thing in the same way that we're talking about with Nebula and like scrolling around and seeing what's going on on the limbs here, like please talk to us about solar imaging.

is this where all of your expenses are lately go it's not it's not as bad as you'd think so that the the system I used to capture that photo it's basically a five inch refractor telescope and it's a doublet which is like familiar with telescopes it's like on the cheaper end of telescopes because there's all these corrective optics that go into just basically preserving the right kind of color because when you pass light through optics it scatters in a weird way sometimes it screws up the colors. So it's like the second cheapest type of telescope. The first cheapest would only have a single optical amount.

This has two optical amounts because you don't need color correction when you're doing solar photography. The reason for that is what I'm using on this telescope, it's a hydrogen alpha filter, but it's a very specifically tuned hydrogen alpha filter. If you just go like, you can go to like a geneastro or like Woodland Hills and get like a hydrogen alpha filter for deep space stuff, it will not work to give you really cool solar photos. And that's because the emission line has to be like super, super narrow.

Like the band pass has to be super narrow. So it's only letting in a half an angstrom of the visual spectrum or the electromagnetic spectrum. Half of angstrom is just like extremely, extremely precise on that hydrogen and alpha emission line. And if you're off just a little bit, you won't see these details. So the way this thing works, it's like this, basically an attachment that goes into your telescope. It's called the Daystar Quark Chromosphere. It's a heat-tune hydrogen alpha filter. There's an energy rejection filter that goes on it.

You plug it into your telescope and then use a monochrome camera. It's got to be monochrome for this to capture the details of the sun. And the light that's coming through, you can actually look at this visually too, by the way. Put an eyepiece on the end of this thing and just observe it, which always feels really. weird, by the way. If you do like solar astronomy visually, it's like your brain says, don't look through the telescope because it's the sun. It's safe. It is safe.

But you look at it and you can see these like incredible things. You see these like Jupiter-sized prominences hanging off the sun. You can see flares happen in real time. These bright bursts of energy. See sunspots, of course. But sunspots are actually really easy to see. You can just use like a neutral density filter basically to see those. Yeah, I have like the cheap, what's the film called?

Like, mylar film? Yeah, I have that for the, I have a dobsonian and a little Celestron C90 that I will whip out just to see some sunspots from time to time when I'm bored or if there's interesting looking ones. But I'm like, man, I got to get one of these hydrant alpha setups at some point. What was the name of the thing that you said? It was the Daystar Cork. Yeah, the Daystar Cormosphere. So paired with this telescope, it's like. extremely zoomed in.

It's like there's like a, it's like a 4x barlow that's like built into the thing, which just magnifies it a lot. So when you're looking through it or you have a camera set up to it, you're looking at like a very, very like zoomed in, cropped area of the sun.

So all of these photos that you see of like the entire sun, I actually assemble those as mosaics. There are a lot of little photos stitched together. But that's cool because then I get these really detailed photos of the sun. So it's worth it. That's awesome.

But yeah, that's exactly how I got that photo was with that setup. It is captured with a monochrome camera. And it's a very narrow emission line. So essentially, so the light that's hitting the camera is red. So if you look through it visually, the sun looks red through the filter. But it's captured monochrome. And then I add this color in processing. So I would say this is like maybe another area.

We can be a little more creative. because there's no color depth to the sun whatsoever when you're capturing it like this. It's literally, it's a flat red that's essentially monogram, which is why you have to use a monochrome camera to capture it. Otherwise, those extra filters, there's something called a bear filter and a camera. That's how you get color photos.

If you add that, it actually blocks more of the sun's light. And as a result, you're not going to see these details. So it has to be captured in monogram. But yeah, that's a funny thing to think about, too. It's like the brightest thing in our world, it's a single color. Just like, you know, add fun to it later. I've always loved how like, I was saying I always loved how like space photography really challenges the idea of like, is it real, a real photograph or did you make it up, right? And it's like on Earth with my phone, it's like very clear what that means.

and then in space it's like very blurry line. It doesn't mean true color. You're like, you just mean like true to human eyes? Like, what does that mean? Yeah. Like, it's just very cool. Yeah. Your eyes are a terrible thing, a terrible instrument to determine the color in space

because they basically stop working when things are dim. You know, if I wear a pink shirt in a dark room, you can't tell that it's pink because you're the, that's the way like the photoreceptors in your eyes are working. They're not able to determine color when something's too faint. It's like trying to see what color of flowers are. or moonlight. You can't. But the color's there.

We know the colors there. We know my shirt's pink. But you just can't resolve it. Just the fix-in-flict shop, then. Yeah. I'm in the photography of the non-astro variety. I am into the ashter photography part two. I just haven't, you know, taking the dive down the rabbit hole.

And I remember, like, talking to certain friends about, like, raw photography back in the day. And they'd be like, wait, so, like, you got to, like, do all this processing to, like, make it look better. And I'm like, well, like, when you think about it, like, this is how your brain works, too. Like, it's just capturing the light values. It's also how your iPhone works. Yeah, right.

It's like, you just have to like slightly more manual than that. But like, it's how everything works. Yeah. There's actually a very strong argument that the, um, the astrophotos are like some of the most hyper accurate photos because you do need such precise, like, color balancing everything to get a good photo. that like, I mean, if you take a photo with a DSLR and just like, just like, nuke the exposures in it, it looks terrible.

And that just kind of shows you kind of how crude the, like, that the native software inside the cameras are. They are very, very crude because usually it's good enough. Usually your subject's well lit, so it doesn't matter. But astrophography, it's like, it becomes like just hyper, hyper accurate because everything is just like so noise free because of the stacking. and that's very precisely color balance based on colors of the stars.

So it's not even that it's not made up. It's just, it's insanely accurate, depending on the type of photo, of course. We got to talk about this photo that kicked us off for the day. Honestly, like, probably my favorite of the moon and iOS, I mean, definitely my favorite of the moon and IOS varieties. probably my favorite like it just makes me feel like I'm living

in the sci-fi universes that we watch and TV shows and stuff. It's a movie poster, man. I love this shot. It is amazing. So I'd love to hear. There was a chat. Kurt had it early on in the feed here of talking about how a lot of the stuff

that we just talked about relied on stacking tons of photos and obviously with the ISS, that's not the case. But with the moon, it certainly can be. So how does that come together to make a photo like this possible? So I do employ stacking techniques for this. It just has to work a little bit differently because obviously the ISS is moving. Move is very quickly.

So when I capture these, I'm usually using two telescopes. I'll have one capturing in color, one of them capturing a monochrome. Reason for that is the monochrome. I can usually get better details. I can put an infrared filter on it, which cuts out a lot of the effects of atmosphere scattering and dispersion, which will make the ISS sharper. And then of course, I just want the color and the photo, so I have to shoot it again. in color. So, and then my field of view is actually very, very tight. It's a very, very small

because I'm using a very long focal length because I want to get those really nice details in the ISS. So I take the photo and then after the ISS passes, I have to go back in and build the rest of the moon as a mosaic. So I go, go back and shoot the missing parts of the moon, basically. So to get a photo like this as crisp as I do, I do want to employ stacking. So the way I do it is I capture the ISS in like 150 frames per second and it zips across my field of view. I get like 30 or 40 images with ISS in it because I'm shooting just at such fast frame rates. And then I take those photos and I actually manually align them in Photoshop and then run the like crop just around the ISS and then throw that into my planetary stacking software. So it actually is able to stack these raw photos of the ISS.

and then I just choose like a single like master frame of where the ISS was like just exactly where I wanted it to be and like against the moon. And then I use those I use those master frames as masks to incorporate composition for the whole thing. Exactly. And that allows me to clean up the noise on the ISS a lot, which allows me to, of course, sharpen it. So I can get better details on ISS. And then I do this, incorporate the same technique on the moon just like I wouldn't even photo. And the resulting image is just like very, very crisp as a result, but also very accurate because that's always like, like, I guess like a moral dilemma. It's like, how much if I stack this image, is this now accurate because I'm now just like kind of just compositing in my stacked ISS photo over the original. So it just I have to like be very true to the original.

Yeah. I mean, it's human perception. True is what you saw when you were there, right? Like that's what true means. So, like, if you were, obviously, you wouldn't even see this. You would see a tiny light flying across the sky really fast and a good-looking moon at the time. When you were talking about taking those photos of the ISS itself, you're saying you would, you're setting your camera up for like where the ISS will fly through and you're capturing it right

when it's zipping through time. And you're all, are you doing that only one time? Are you trying to get a couple of moments of it as it traverses the sky? Well, I really only have time. I mean, I guess in this case, it's only where the moon is, right? So there's just like, that's a shot right there. Right. I mean, if I'm capturing the ISS by itself,

I actually have a mount that can track just the ISS. You plug in the telemetry data and it'll actually track the ISS as it goes. The problem is, though, well, then, like, the equatorial mouth is not going to help you because the ISS is going to be turning as it flies around Earth. It's keeping its, you know, it's pointed. Equatorial mounts are not ideal for this because the ISS, it's like small on the horizon, gets biggest when it's straight overhead,

and then get small again when it's at its biggest is exactly when the equatorial mountain has to do a meridian flip. So you end up losing the best time. And it's very frustrating because you're like, want to push it to and you're like, I'm going to hit my peer. I'm going to hit my peer. And then, oh, I hit my peer, damn it. I just meant generally that like, it's not, you know, vectorial mounts are canceling out the Earth's rotation. But the ISS is rotating around Earth as it's continuing to point prograde. So it's sticking on its heading basically around Earth.

So you're going to capture, from the first start of the past, you're capturing a different angle in the ISS than you are the rest of the way. So, like, stacking works for that one particular moment when it's in that one spot in the sky. But if you get a couple degrees separated, the ISS is, its angle is different to you, yeah? Yeah, you nailed it. I mean, you can only stack a very small number of photos. I think I figured out where anything over five seconds, and you start to get the motion blur from the ISS shifting.

So I stack my ISS photos and, like, five second increments when I'm doing like a track DysS shot because exactly what you're describing it's like you're seeing a car coming down the freeway and then it like passes you and you see the side and then you keep driving and you're seeing it but so it's going where it's going it's changing its angle the entire time it's coming towards you because we live in three dimensional space um I mean the detail that you get on it is just like I literally see the new solar arrays on there like yeah you know it's that's pretty crazy Yeah, that turned out good.

You know, a lot of that comes down to luck because, you know, unlike the, unlike if I'm like, let's say, shooting a planet where I can kind of stay on it for hours, this, I'm kind of at the mercy of like what the atmosphere is doing. So I don't, what I don't share, like all my failures. I would say about half of my IS shots never see the light a day. Because they look like this, but just blurry. So I'm like, I'm not going to bother sharing that. What am I going to do with that?

Yeah, exactly. And it's depressing too because I actually drive hours for these because you're, you know, it's such a precise alignment with a moon. So I'm like, all right, I found one that's happening in northern Arizona and then I drive all the way up there. And then something goes wrong and I'm not getting the shot. It's a very long drive back, like all depressed with all my equipment. The time zone on Google Maps screwed up and you don't know when you're going to get there.

Yeah, I always always. double and triple check the time. Before we finish, please tell people where to find your work and any particular projects that are going on right now that you would want people to be aware of. And your calendars? The calendars.

Oh, yeah. Go to Cosmic. Oh, I like the workpacking calendar. It's very therapeutic for me. Yeah, I go to cosmic background.io if you want to buy my calendar. It's right there on the front page. I'm also selling this guy that's like behind me. This like, it's a composite image of the solar system.

It's just kind of a nice benchmark of like kind of how far I've come as an astrophotographer because, you know, getting these details on these images is so hard. So I put together kind of like the best of the best shots and create these composites that kind of make for cool art pieces. So you can see mine makes for cool office decor. Absolutely. And your Patreon, if you want to plug that. Oh, yeah.

I'm on that thing and it's awesome. I thought that's where I throw all of my high resolution stuff so people can just like download it and make wallpapers for their for their phones or their desktops if you have like a 4K monitor I like always like everything's like way high resolution than 4K so makes just some cool desktop wallpapers um I'm all about that life so get on it take you got your shopping list now apparently yeah yeah no I I need to get I I've always had a tell And then I sold it when I moved here because it was, you know, an international move. And so I think it's time again. I think it's, I've been talking about it. I think it's time to get back into it and pick a new one. I had a dobsonian before. I had an eight inch dobsonian.

And I can hated moving around, man. It was so big and so heavy. It was like, you know, it was as tall as I am. And I needed a goddamn cart to drive it around or something. But so I'm going to look for something that's more like this size that I can like carry in a case and do something with. So I got to do some shop. Which one, Andrew? Tell them which one.

Get an 8-inch SCT. It'll be a little bit more manageable than the 8-inch job. And it'll be optimized for planets. SETC-C-C-Castrian. Schmit-Cassigraine, Jake. There we go. Schmidt-Cassigrain. It'll be a lot more manageable.

You're downplaying how the manageability of the 8-inch dobs. I have one of those. It's a battering ram if you need to break in anyone's house also. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. It wouldn't get in my car's trunk,

unless I took it apart. That's how big it was. So I have a 14-inched obsonian. That's a piece of artillery at that point. What you have to do is get a cover, then an all-weather cover to put over it, so you don't have to move it. All-weather in Arizona, it means a lot of different things than the hurricane zone that Jake and occasionally I live in. What you do is it by a Ford F-150 and you just put it into the bed and just stick it right? He cut the observatory hole in the roof and there it is. Oh, dear.

All right. All right. Angie, thanks so much for hanging out. Jake, next week, I think it's just me and you. We're talking about we've got to catch up on like some Starship stuff and. Yeah, we have a lot of news to catch up on. I'm going to read a GEO report. Yeah, we started to get at it in the pre-show today for all of our Discord supporters.

So if you want to see those hot takes, we're talking about New Glenn today. That was fun. We didn't get anywhere. Maybe we got somewhere. We got a little bit. We concluded some things. We'll see. Yes, we did.

Offnom.com slash discord. Yeah. People are saying, why isn't the pre-show content? And the pre-show is specifically not content. That was not, our goal was to have a non-content thing where we hang out and we, in my case, I drink my first drink during the pre-show and we yell at each other about dragonfly, which is also a thing we did today. It got a little hot for a second.

Got a little bit. A little spicy, a little toasty. But yeah, no, I'm excited to catch up on some of the news. we haven't really talked about Starship at all in any format yet. No. Andrew saw it. We didn't even talk about it one bit. Yeah.

Yeah. That's great. That's it. That's great. So go check out. Go check out Andrew's Twitter and his website because he's got some photos of that kind of thing. Yeah. We'll pull him up when we talk about it next week and then we can feel like we've fulfilled the bit.

Yeah. There we go. Everybody. Thanks again, Andrew. We will see you all next week. Thanks, Andrew. 5-4-3-1-end to death.