5 minute Fridays should be mandatory for all discerning astrophotographers. Thanks, Nico!

You could literally do a years worth of 5 minute Fridays on this topic. Good primer Nico.

Week 23 of appreciating Five Minute Fridays

Super clear. That was a 32Bit subject expressed in 8! ;) Just a ‘bit’ of humor there!

That was explained really well... Thx Nico

Long ago, after a couple years playing with my first digital slr and still shooting everything on Auto or “P”, someone said to me, “learn to use the histogram and it will change your life.” And it did. But took me a few weeks to realize that it really was as simple as what you just explained in 5 minutes. So, yeah. Wish I’d seen this back then 🤗. Meanwhile, I know *nothing* of astrophotography, but finally moved to a small island where the night sky 🌌 is often clear and dark and amazing. So now I’m interested, and planning to binge-watch your channel videos 🙏🙏🙏

as someone wanting to get into astrophotography I can't tell you how helpful this was. I've watched tons of videos showing adjusting the image using the histogram, but never understood what it was. Thanks for the simple, easy to understand explaination.

Taking a mechatronics class in school and just finished my exam on Analog to Digital signal conversion. This video would have really helped me pass that exam haha

Not just good at taking photos Nico genius explaining how it works too!

Fantastic Video Nico!! Love These Informative Camera Specs, You should do a Lot more!! In your Next One, You could Include, 'what Is Full Well Depth' pixel size for Astrophotography. This is Was Very Informative!! Loved it!

Very well explained Nico. Even I understood it! 👍🏻 Noddy

Thank you! I have always been a BIT confused about this topic.

And one needs to use 16-bit TIFs on digital cameras because the sensors are 12-bit or 14-bit you need a 16-bit "bucket" to dump that sensor data to. If you're stacking hundreds of 16-bit images having the flexibility of stretching that image stack for bringing out all the subtle nuances of dim objects you will indeed need 32-bit to 64-bit per channel resulting image files so you don't clip anything prematurely.

I am grateful to you for helping me on my astrophotography journey.

such an unusual representation of bitdepth for photography! Love from Israel

Explained really well.

Always love your videos ❤

Brilliant explanation of bit depth and the histogram with the tea cups. Very effective and easy to understand. I had to laugh at the green computer screen. I am of the vintage to remember those computers (which were soooo powerful). Dr B from Manitoba

You explained this clearly. Thank you!

Great explanation Nico! Well done!

great Video 👌 i love the effort you put in

Dude... This was a great explanation and presentation.

Thanks, Nico simple and well explained

Great Nico! This is the kind of subject that many avoid- it is hard to explain succinctly in an interesting way.

@NebulaPhotos

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks Adam! That means a lot coming from you.

Despite knowing all of it already, this was well worth watching and felt like 30 secs. Thank you.

Super good!

Nico, the first 3:55 were excellent. I'm a teacher and I know excellence. Then I got lost when you started doing things with the histogram. I'm looking forward to learning what those manipulations are doing.

@NebulaPhotos

2 жыл бұрын

Good call Ron, I think I got self conscious and tried to tie the topic more directly to astrophotography in the final minute. I should have just kept going with what I was building in the first four. In any case, I will expand on that last part in a future video.

Well explained Nico.

0:57 You are 'old enough'? Nah! 😁 . Great video. I enjoy your technical stuff.

This was the best explanation of histograms and bit depth I've seen! Thank you!

I want to know why we have a green channel. Why not yellow? (Yellow and blue make green. Red and yellow gives us orange.) So how do we end up with yellow? Do we get there by dumbing down the red channel? It seems illogical to have chosen green over yellow. I like THIS channel. Please continue to provide us with informative and interesting videos. Thank you.

@NebulaPhotos

2 жыл бұрын

Complex to answer these questions in a youtube comment, but I'll try. Firstly, color works different in a subtractive vs. additive mix. You are describing subtractive which is true of paints or whenever we mix color with physical media like ink. This is why printers use Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and black inks (sometimes more) to make full color prints. More on this here: blog.thepapermillstore.com/color-theory-additive-subtractive-colors/ An additive mix works different. If you shine equal amounts red, green and blue at full intensity you get white light. All other colors can be created by mixing some intensity of red, green and blue. If you only shined the red light, that would be a pure red. In an additive color model: red+green=yellow. I know that's hard to accept since in a subtractive model that would give you brown. There is also the relationship of RGB to human vision. We have short, medium, and long cones that correspond somewhat to blue, green, and red. They overlap in such a way that our eyes are much more sensitive to green then the other two, which is why we use RGGB. Technology Connections did a nice little explanation in this video: kzread.info/dash/bejne/d5Vq1tlml9jSnrQ.html

Great explanation. Thank you very much

Thanks, Nico! That’s the most understandable explanation I’ve encountered. As a beginner, I’ve been confused by the histogram. Keep up the good work!

Loved this, great demonstration and i could even follow You, thanks!

Cool video Nico, great explanation of bit depth but, should you ever come to the UK, don't make tea that looks like that lol

Thanks for this Nico and for all the other videos you offer as well!

Thanks for explaining a histogram. Im going to a media school for 4 years now and i actually never learnt what a histogram is lmao 😂😂

That's why a monitor with 10 bits allows more than 1 billion colors. 2^10 by color or (2^10)^3= 2^30. Meaning 64 times more colors. Looking from curve discretization, it means 1024 divisions on each axys of the histogram. Therefore, a small part of the curve reached by signals on astro, we have 4 times more divisions on that small range

Great terse explanation. For Mind-numbing Mondays, you could explain hexadecimal.

that was awesome ...i learned so much

6 months ago? I can't believe I missed this. Great info

Thank you!

That looked like Oregon Tail, lol. Great video :)

Brilliant ! Was waiting to see you colour in 8 bit grayscale with your marker pen. 😃The question I have is … how does this feed into the aim of having your histogram c1/3 from the left when imaging. Thanks Nico !

Please make a editing video explaining why and what does each step does to an image, like you explained histograms.

Haha good ole Oregon Trail 😂. Brings back memories of Carmen San Diego too lol

Didn't realize I could learn so much in 300 seconds

I'm curious why in Photoshop, taking a 32-bit stacked file and stretching it seems to work so much differently than first converting to 16-bit and then stretching it. When stretching a 32-bit file, it seems to get washed out using the levels adjustment where-as with a 16-bit file, the stretching seems to work "as expected". I would expect that at 32-bit, the additional data would help stretching and produce better results. It was confusing that it seemed to work very differently and my results were unexpectedly poorer from a visual perspective.

This was a good "bit" of information. ;) Absolutely think we need some additional #FMF's on this topic. Loved the data!

Excellent video Nico! Did you end up drinking all that tea (before dying of dysentery on the Oregon Trail :))??

Nico Dude, you’re a bad ass!!!

I think I remember reading somewhere that green text on black background was easiest to read.

@Lukionest

2 жыл бұрын

I remember not reading somewhere that black text on black background was the most difficult to read. I've tried that by unplugging my monitor and it seems to be true.

When you spilled the tea, was that supposed to represent blooming? LOL. Excellent job, Nico! Short, succinct and under the 5 minutes. That's 2 weeks in a row now I think... and as someone else wrote, you could probably do a year's worth of 5 minute Fridays on this topic.

Its like an eq for pictures

How can I use information from the histogram to determine if I am using the correct iso and exposure settings? I try to adjust the settings so the peak is in the middle of my histogram for each sub exposure. Although I sometimes find that I get inconsistent results.

We started on the same computer and it looks like the same program Oregon trail

un related question is ...what piano do you have ...i have a clavinova sounds gorgeous ...notice how astophotographers nearly all play the piano

How does this relate to the bit depth of a camera? 14 bit cameras vs. 16 bit etc.

Nico great video. I think you need one more shade of tea though :)

Pls recommend me a DSLR(best one),a filter wheel, an autofocuser ,an autoguider and a tracker for Celestron C14 SCT and all the filters needed for it

@NebulaPhotos

2 жыл бұрын

What is your budget and do you really mean DSLR? Usually with a filter wheel you'd be using a mono astronomy camera, not a DSLR.

@soubhikdas1586

2 жыл бұрын

@@NebulaPhotos can you tell me the most advanced and best setup under 13350 USD

@soubhikdas1586

2 жыл бұрын

@@NebulaPhotos pls tell me high end and most advanced set up in 15000 dollars , I didn't knew that you should not use dslr .

....and my first computer had 1 gigbyte of hard drive memory space.....and people said, what will you do with all that memory, :) the good old days. Great video, so did you drink all that tea?

As always very clear video Nico! One question regarding histogram. People say that you should expose your deep sky image such that histogram is at one third distance from the left hand side. Why is that? What happens if I expose it to the far right but not too far to prevent clipping of highlights? When shooting from a light polluted location, back of the camera jpeg looks horrible but if you look at the histogram, it is often in the middle or to the right. That always confuses me.

@NebulaPhotos

Жыл бұрын

Complex question, but here is my short answer: If you plan to stack, there is usually no advantage to going past 1/3 over from left, because you have already captured all the usable information, and gotten the exposure off the noise floor. The only reason not to go to 1/2 or expose to the right is you will lose star color (stars will clip to pure white and no color info can be recovered if they are clipped). From a light polluted location, there may not be much star color to be had anyways so it may not matter to you, and you may want to expose to the middle or right just so you don't have so many short subs to deal with. But there is usually no advantage to longer subs - if you get equal total integration, the stacked image from the shorter subs (1/3 over from left) will either work better (more star color) or at least match the stacked image from the longer subs.

@ssbhide123

Жыл бұрын

@@NebulaPhotos Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation! Regarding longer sub-exposure, isn't it better than many short sub exposures? I read somewhere that because incoming signal is random, 100x1min is not the same as 10x10min, (I think it was DSS's website) and longer sub exposure will capture more of a fainter detail? I guess, I will do a comparison some day from my light polluted skies, with histogram in the middle and at 1/3rd to see what works the best. Thanks again!!

@NebulaPhotos

Жыл бұрын

​@@ssbhide123 Maybe, it's a complex question that involves a lot of factors. The reason 1/3 histogram rule works is because it takes into account light pollution which your example does not. But let's ignore light pollution. If you are going after exceedingly faint details under very dark skies with a perfect camera (low noise, large full well capacity) there will likely be an advantage to 10x10' vs. 100x1'. Although I think that is a bit of an extreme example as many people are limited by other factors (light pollution, bad camera noise at low ISO, tracking errors, etc.) that make 10 minute subs not practical or wise. So if we were to instead compare something like 100x1' to 50x2' if they are both at least 1/3 over from left, I think you will see very little actual difference in the final stack. There have been some youtube videos that tackle this. I have one that covers another extreme (no tracker vs. tracker) that shows you can't expect VERY short untracked subs (1 second) to compete with 30 second tracked subs when it comes to dim detail. I believe Galactic Hunter has one that looks at sub length from 1 minute to 1 hour.

@ssbhide123

Жыл бұрын

@@NebulaPhotos Thanks!! I will definitely check both of those videos!!

Anybody know why the histogram in my 16803 looks extremely quantized?

I really dislike the histogram as a scope, since waveforms do it much better. But it's a stills world I assume. The actual mathematics of stacking for precision (more bit depth) and noise reduction (more meaningful data) would be an interesting topic.

Hey a late bloomer in AP here. Thanks for your video. I usually see people processing their pictures start with the histogram way to the left of the histogram. Arent they loosing any information by doing so? Should I aim to having the histogram on the first quarter most of the times?

@NebulaPhotos

2 жыл бұрын

Yes, if the peak of your histogram is at around the first quarter (25%) to 1/3 (33%), you are well-exposed and there is no need to expose further. The reason this is different than the advice for daylight photography is most of the pixels when we are shooting the night sky are empty space or deep sky objects both of which are in the shadows. As long as you have some separation from the left edge (0) then you are not losing information.

@andesastro

2 жыл бұрын

@@NebulaPhotos thanks a lot Nico, for your answer and all the cool information in your channel. Cant wait to give it a go… ill do baby steps starting off with a nifty fifty and then a higher FL to end in a small refractor. Clear skies!

Hello. I just bought my first used dslr to put it on my scope my question is what aperture should i use? Ill connect it to a skywatcher 70/500

@zoli8569

2 жыл бұрын

OH WAIT I JUST UNDERSTAND IT. You cant andjust it RIGHT??!?!

@NebulaPhotos

2 жыл бұрын

Correct, unlike most lenses, a telescope has a fixed aperture, so the only things to adjust to get a proper exposure are ISO and exposure length (aka shutter speed))

@zoli8569

2 жыл бұрын

@@NebulaPhotos Ok. THANKS

🤯

Nico, it's going to take you five hours, not five minutes, to go through all of this! How about 12, 14 and yes, even 16 bit mono cameras.

Yes … No … If you get it, you get it.

Dude, why have you got so many teacups?…

@NebulaPhotos

2 жыл бұрын

Ha, I used to work in a restaurant and they were throwing them out. I'm a bit of a packrat as this was over 10 years ago now.