Chasing the Andromeda Galaxy

I knew from the beginning that training photography would be one of the many topics which I would like to discuss in my blog. A friend of mine asked if I wanted to go taking pictures of night stars with him, and I decided that I wanted to make something out of that for my first blog post.

We chose to make a shooting based on a video tutorial of an astrophotographer Nico Carver about shooting the Andromeda Galaxy. The whole process was very technical and quite ambitious to be the first real try for me to shoot stars at night but I wanted to give it a try. I really wanted to see what kind of picture I could be able to take with my old camera and one of the lenses I had.

I must say I didn’t follow all of his steps, but I will explain everything I used myself during the process.

The video tutorial:

The programs I used:

• Star Walk 2 phone app - helped me to locate the galaxy from the sky

• Capture One just for sorting out the pictures

• DeepSkyStacker 4.2.5 for stacking the photos together

• Adobe Photoshop for the editing

The main equipment I had while shooting:

• Canon 100D camera

• Canon FDn 200mm f/2.8 object

• Tripod (with easily adjustable ball head)

• Intervalometer

Other useful things I recommend to have:

• Headlamp

• Torch

• Soft cloths for wiping the lense

• Very warm clothes and something to eat & drink

• Photography friends

• Lots of time and patience in every step of the process

The settings I used with the camera and the lense:

• Shutter Speed: 1s

• ISO: 3200

• F-stop: 2,8

• Focus: Manually adjusted

FIRST NIGHT TRY 13th - 14th of September 2020

First we assembled our equipment. I warmed up myself by shooting some random experimental pictures about the stars and myself as a silhouette. It was pretty funny and some good exercise to run up a hill of sand in 10 seconds and try to stay still in goofy positions as the camera was slowly making the exposure of the photo. You can see one of the resulted pictures in the right.

Pretty soon I kept having problems with the lens as it started to get covered by steam very quickly after just a couple of shots. The sky looked clear and beautiful but on the ground the humidity was time to time so high that we were basically shooting inside a foggy cloud.

After a while it was my time to start shooting the main object. The task was challenching as the Andromeda galaxy was so dim that I couldn't really say I saw it - I just knew where it should be located based on the stars around it. It didn’t take me long to find the location from the night sky with the help of the Star Walk 2 App and with my bare eyes - but when I tried to find it trough the camera lens, it was totally another story. The whole sky looks very different from its view as the distance and brightness of the stars seems changed. Also the lens makes a lot more stars visible that you don’t normally see.

I spent almost an eternity staring at the night sky and targeting the camera, and didn’t feel my feet or neck anymore when I finally caught the galaxy on my test photo. I tried to locate it with the help of different constellations which are easier to spot, and I finally found it by following the path star by star from Cassiopeia to Andromeda. Some casual planes and/or satellites helped to confirm my position with the lens as well.

One of the easiest ways to locate the Andromeda galaxy is to “star hop”. My tip is to find Cassiopeia first,
this is a W-shaped constellation that appears almost directly overhead at this time of year.

After I had found the galaxy with the lense it was time to center the object and check the focus and the settings. Then I was able to start shooting. I used intervalometer because with that you can take series of photos without the need of you pressing the button hundreds of times and risking the whole camera to shake constantly. I also watched out that my headlamp or other lights didn't disturb the shooting so majorly I just stood there in the darkness and watched the sky, listening my camera taking photo after photo. Of course I needed to go and recenter the object after couple of hundreds shots every time because of the Earth's rotation. The lense still got covered by steam very quickly so I had to keep wiping it too. After few hours I decided being finished as I got around 2000 pictures, so we collected the equipment and drove back to the city.

When it was time to upload the pictures to the computer and start stacking them I found out a big problem. I had accidentally pressed some kind of bracket button and it made the photos to be shot in three different exposures: ⅛ of a second, one second, and 8 seconds. And now I remembered wondering how the camera sounded like it was taking the photos in a very weird rhythm. Like wow, it actually should have been obvious - you could hear the camera was using three different kinds of exposure times.

I tried to stack the photo and edit the final result but as I had so very little amount of pictures with the right exposure I couldn't go far with it. After a while, I knew I needed to do the whole shooting again. To my relief, there was meant to be a clear sky already few days later, but more about the second try in the next post.