Some nights things just don't go right - a failed attempt at imaging the cygnus region of the milky way

 From the back garden

With views restricted only to looking North west to East (steep garden, woodland, houses, bright lights - you name it - I'm surrounded by it), astrophotography from the garden can be tricky and restrictive.

However, I have spent the last two nights trying to capture the Cygnus region Milky Way. 

So here are the details of these back garden micro-adventures. 

Target:

• The milky way in the Cygnus region stretching from Deneb down towards Altair

I tried to frame it with Deneb in the top left hand corner down to Altair in the right hand corner of my frame - but that didn't work - bits of house, bits of trees and bushes. The best I could get was it going semi horizontally across the frame - not ideal but hey ho - sometimes you just have to go with the flow. 

Equipment:

I thought I'd give CoPilot AI a go and get it to recommend to me what equipment I should use and what settings as well given the date, bortle sky area and moon phase. And, surprisingly, it wasnt far out! 

• Astromodded canon 800D
• Samyang 14 mm F/2.8 lens
• SWSA 21 with William Optics wedge
• Benbro Mach 3 carbon fibre tripod
• MSM green laser pen for polar alignment
• Two power banks - one for camera and one for dew heater band
• Samsung A10 galaxy tablet for white screen for flats 
• Aoelan intervalomneter - wireless remote 
• GoPro Hero 9 action cam with small cvub light and amazon basics tripod for videoing

Settings:

Cloudless skies from 0030 and light winds. Temperature around 15C throughout the night. Moon at 53% and growing larger following night. 

Taking all this into account - my initial test shots and histogram review suggested:

• ISO 800
• shutter speed 30"
• aperture F/2.8
• best shooting times 0030 to 0230

And, CoPilot - got all that right! Go figure! 

I ended up with 100 useable light frames, 25 darks, 30 biases and rubbish flats which I had to reject - they came out a horrible orange colour and I have absolutely no idea why - so they have been ditched. 

However, I also came out with some terrible coma and star trailing at the edges - and again I have no idea why.

Some sessions just work well. Others, well they serve up a horrible  'porridge' of mistakes and errors. Still, the best learning comes from analysing our mistakes, doesn't it. 

Below is the final image - full of mistakes: 

So, what are the errors? 

• A lack of sharpness to the stars - it was very evident that there were some coma issues on all of the images - particularly around the edges - and there was nothing I could do to sort it
• I think my Ball Head was slipping through the night - very slow, almost unperceptible, creep
• I think my star adventurer 2i tracker clutch may not have been tight enough

Since then, I have checked over the tracker, sorted and repaired the ball head, and checked my samyang lens focus.

This really is a poor image and I just can't account for the disasters you can see in it. 

My very first star trail - a mixed bag of successes

 Here is the very first star trail I have ever taken. I'm really pleased with it - not because its a great image - but because the story behind its acquistion is one of persistence and perserverence. 

Let's jump in and unpick the story behind it. 

Location: Wembury Beach in South Devon - the building is the old Mill House owned by the National Trust 

Image details: 

• 90 x 30" lights with 2" interval between photos
• ISO 800
• F/2.8

Equipment: 

• Astromodded Canon 800D
• Samyang 14mm F/2.8 mm lens
• Benbro Mach 3 Carbon fibre tripod
• Joby Gorillapod 5Kg ball head
• one power bank for dummy camera battery
• one power bank for dew band heater
• Neewer dew band heater 

Issues on the night: 

• car lights from cars entering and exiting the car park above the mill house
• red head torch glow from other astrophotographers visiting the site 
• facing a direction and part of the sky which had regular plane traffic crossing it 

So, where does the persistence/perserverence part come into the story? 

I used two programs to obtain the image - STARSTAX and AFFINITY PHOTO v1. 

A straight starstax of the original, unedited files, gave me this image: 

It is straight out of my astromodded camera and has some sort of artistic merit I am sure. The Andy Warhol image of the astrophotography world! 😉

What I wanted to do was to batch edit the 90 photos in one go in Affinity photo - simple things - quick edits - so that I could just try Starstax: 

• white balance adjustments
• colour adjustments
• contrast adjustments
• shadows and highlights adjustments
• sharpness and noise adjustments 

The first step - batch editing the 90 RAW files and converting them into TIff files for Starstax - went off without a hitch.

And then I descended into a three hour long hell - Dante's pit deepest level stuff. 

Affinity Photo would record a macro of the adjustments I made on one of the photos but wouldn't then send it to the library so that I could then batch apply the changes to all the other images. 

In desperation - I asked 'CoPilot' for help. 

Three hours later.........

CoPilot suggested all sorts of fixes - none of which worked.

 It gave me alternative methods - none of which worked.  

Between every new suggestion it - reassured me that it wasn't my fault. It assured me that the next fix was the one that would work immediately. It thanked me for my patience and reminded me again (and again, and again....and again) that none of this was my fault. 

At the end of three hours - it told me that this was a known fault with affinity photo version one and so there was nothing I could do about it!  And thanked me for my patience! 

No, seriously, that was its parting message to me.  I didn't mind the trying of the different fix approaches - that was fine - a problem solving step by step approach. Up for that. 

It was the condescending claptrap - lines of it - between each fix which drove me up the wall. It was like a parent trying to sooth a stroppy toddler or teenager. All praise, all support - "not your fault, you are such a good boy waiting so patiently and dont worry I will definitely fix this for you - you need to do nothing!"

For Pete's sake!  😠😭

Lessons learned:

• Know when to bail out on CoPilot
• after doing the basic edits - take time to do some masking - so that the foreground detail is drawn out further - and the sky stars are enhanced
• some good noise reduction and clarity work on the sky and stars