Chasing The Andromeda Galaxy Part 2.

The 2nd night photography attempt 18th - 19th of September 2020

This post continues where I left from my previous blog post.

Preparing

I had some technical issues in the first attempt to take a photo of the Andromeda galaxy. I decided to try again as soon as possible and luckily there was a clear night sky again next Friday. Before that, I went through the whole process again writing down every single step I needed to do since I had no intention to fail this time. It was nice to notice that all the photography steps felt clearer now and I was sure I could not make the same mistake again without noticing it. 

My sister volunteered to come along, so late on Friday night we took the car and drove to the exact same spot where I was previously. It was almost midnight and it had been completely dark for a while already. This time there were some other cars parked there too but we didn't see any people around. We put our lights on and started to unpack the camera equipment and set up the tripod. It was slightly windy and colder than last time but the sky looked amazing and crystal clear just like the other night.

Searching and shooting again

I set the camera and double-checked the settings. I took a picture with my phone of my set-up which you can see on the right. Then I started to look for the right constellations in the sky. I found the location of the galaxy quickly with my bare eyes and checked it from the Star Walk 2 app. The screenshot in the top right corner shows a view from the app. Then it was time to move to the hard part again - finding the galaxy through the camera lens. Like in the last time, I pointed out the object of the camera at the Cassiopeia constellation. When I was sure which one of the stars I was pointing at, I continued from there star by star closer to the Andromeda constellation.

My sister got a good idea of the location too and helped me to spot moving objects like planes or satellites from the sky to make it easier for me to confirm the location. I don’t know if there's always so much traffic in the sky but this time there was something going on all the time. Now it took me “just” about half an hour to find the galaxy with the object so I was relieved when that foggy little spot finally appeared in the test picture.

I started to shoot the first round of pictures and from that point the photographing session got pretty simple: I just needed to recenter the camera pointing to the galaxy from time to time. And check that the lens is in focus and dry and clear. The intervalometer made its job and the camera took hundreds of pictures in a row. This time the clicking sound of the camera was steady like it was supposed to, and I didn’t notice any kind of humidity problem with the lens. I still wiped it a couple of times between the shots just in case.

The Night Walkers (and one runner)

Soon after starting we saw moving lights coming from the woods. The group of hikers - or whatever they were doing there - started to approach us. We put on our headlights and paused the shooting. It's funny how far away people greet each other in the dark forest. When they saw our camera setting they curiously stopped by to have a friendly chat with us. Then they wished us good luck for photographing and drove away. I continued shooting and we shut the lights off again.

The camera taking thousands of pictures takes its sweet time so we talked, watched the sky, and had a little snack in the darkness while waiting. When I had taken almost half of the pictures, all of a sudden we heard a quick loud voice from the woods. For me that sounded like an animal in despair. For my sister it sounded like a scream of a human being. We cringed at each other and joked out loud wondering what was the noise and in which direction it even came from. My sister walked a circle lighting the forest with the torch and then we just shut the lights again and continued shooting.

We were quietly chatting in the complete darkness when I suddenly heard loud and clear that something was running fast and straight towards us from the woods. I shouted in terror and made my sister jump up to the air frightened. We opened our lights and now saw a man just a couple meters away from us without a single light on! He froze and looked as stunned as we did so I hesitantly greeted him. He greeted me back, sounding apologizing. I started laughing out loud and apologized for scaring him with my shouting. ‘’That’s okay, you are allowed to shout if someone runs towards you in the darkness..!’’ He said looking still surprised.

Now we started to see many other torch lights appearing in his direction. Another big group of people, seemingly his friends, started to come closer. They had their torches and headlamps on like normal people in the dark and greeted us curiously. I wondered which one of them screamed the first time and watched as this random night adventuring group (including the lightless man) walked into their cars and drove away. Now the only car there was ours. After this we started to be clearly tired as we kept constantly laughing at that scare moment and jumping from the minorest noises we heard. We continued the process anyway to the point that I had much more photos than last time. Still in the end this photographing session was a lot quicker than previous one. For the final part I shooted the dark and light files as the video tutorial suggested. Then we packed the car and fled from the scene freaking fast as on that point we heard again some upcoming footsteps and didn't really want to check what the hell was approaching us this time. :D

This is one of the over 2000 photoes I took that night.

They all looked pretty much like this.

The Editing

Soon after photographing, I uploaded the photos to the DeepSkyStacker program. I let it run through the night as I knew it's gonna take a lot of time. After 10 hours of waiting, I had to redo it all over again as my hard drive run out of space and the whole program crashed down. That took whole another day so remember to always check the space! The second try worked in the end and I was relieved. It was curious to see the result which was hundreds of pictures stacked together into one. It wasn't supposed to look like anything yet in this stage though, just really dark photo with very little light spots.

I started to edit the picture trying to follow as much as I could how he edited in the tutorial. That was sometimes really hard because I kept having many issues with the photo which were not discussed in the tutorial. Pretty soon I was able to see the galaxy but the photo was turning super white from the beginning. There was also seemingly an issue with the focus of the picture as the objects were not that sharp and the stars looked weird. Some of them looked like enormous planets in the photo. I wonder if the problem was with the camera or if my manual focus just wasn't in the focus after all even though I checked it multiple times. I was able to edit the space darker but when I tried to edit the galaxy separately from the stars the program refused as it seemed not to recoqnise the objects. So I really had to settle for simpler editing than in the tutorial video. After some trial and errors I finally decided that the photo was finished. For the last part I turned it upside down because that is the way the Andromeda Galaxy is usually presented. There are some pictures of the editing process below.

One of the over 2000 pictures after shooting.

All of the over 2000 pictures stacked together.

The photo after the first stretching edit.

The photo after much more editing.

The zoomed part of the final photo presenting the focus issue.

As my blog is for training purposes I found this process quite fitting to be posted here. Even though the final result is not that impressing after ridiculously many hours of work. And I could have easily spent even more time especially with editing part. But as the major problem with the photo was the focus, I thought it would not make a big difference to edit it further. I know the end result looks weird and shaky but that is the start of the night photographing for me so I still kinda love the photo. And it is a glimpse of some outer space which is pretty cool itself. Maybe I can remake this some day when I've got better photography and editing skills, and much fancier equipment. :)

Here's final edit of my photo of the Andromeda Galaxy. :>

Thanks for all the readers!