Keep in mind this video can apply to any DSLR or Mirrorless camera, including Sony, Canon, etc. While this video focuses on Fujifilm cameras, it's mostly the specific settings of the camera itself - everything else (concepts, trackers, in-field techniques, image processing) will work with any type of camera!
I clicked on this because it was on my feed because I watch all your videos. I am 73 years old and I have never owned any kind of camera until August 2023. I bought an asi294 camera. Works pretty good.
@@ianlauerastro actually yes: what's the most compact tracker that I can put in a backpack but still works decently? I love in the UK but I'm from the Italian Appennines where my father owns a lot of telescopes so I'd like to have a portable tracker to take around 🤣
@@rezzoc91 Everyone has a different definition of portable 😁 I'd say the Star Adventurer Pro 2i or the iOptron trackers are portable (at least for me and my friends when we go deep into the wilderness). There's also a mini version of the Star Adventurer that weighs less but holds less weight.
Ian thoughts on mechanical vs electronic shutter for astro? I wanna dabble in some astro but I dont want to throw a lot of money into this hobby and I am not able at this point to invest in star tracker and I also have a lot of light pollution, is it even worthwhile? Would I be able to get decent images of stuff like orion nebula untracked? I have an x-t30ii, xc 50-230 f4.5-6.7, a 18-50 f2.8 and a 135mm f2
With a mechanical shutter you’ll just need to change your interval time between shots to be ~3 seconds. Deep space needs darker skies, so getting any distance from light pollution will help (light pollution adds noise which makes it harder to distinguish your target from the noise of the background sky glow). You can do deep space without a tracker, it just takes many more photos (thousands or even more) and much more effort (especially on your computer!) Bray Falls and Nebula Photos both have great videos on photographing deep space without a tracker
@@ianlauerastro Thank you for reply, I have looked at dark site finder and the best sky I can get to is like bortle 5, would this be dark enough? I would like to shoot with the 135mm and I think following npf rule I can only shoot for about 1 to 1.5sec if not mistaken, you said I would need probably thousand photos so I would prefer to preserve my shutter, is there any issue with using electronic shutter for astro or do I need to use mechanical? I am new to photography in general
@@nukert658no major difference between mechanical vs electronic - electronic will let you take exposures faster. A bortle 5 is OK but if your target is bright enough (like andromeda or Orion) you should be able to image it with enough photos
Wonderful job Ian! And so glad to see others showing off how easy and capable Siril is for processing our astrophotography. Nerdy question (and I might have missed it, so apologies if I did): Can the Fuji cameras combine an internal bulb timer with the internal interval timer? It didn't look like you were using an external intervalometer, and you mentioned shooting 50 sec. subs. I've found many cameras have both, but it's impossible to combine the functions so if I want to use the internal interval timer I'm limited to 30s. subs. Wondering if Fuji doesn't have that limitation.
Thanks Nico - Siril is awesome and the team behind it are even more awesome! The built-in intervelometer on the XT4 lets you do shutters speeds to 15 minutes, and has settings that can do 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 2 min, 4 min, 8 min, and 15 min. These can be used with the interval timer shooting setting which is soooooo nice for astro. The older X-series models don't have that and also require an external intervelometer (I used to use one on my XT1), though I don't remember exactly when they made the change.
@@ianlauerastroThat's amazing! Only other camera I had that did that was the Nikon D810a. Annoyingly even my Canon Ra doesn't have that functionality! Such a silly oversight for their flagship astrophotography camera.
The 150-600 is a great place to start! The slower f-ratio will hinder your light gathering ability, but since you've got the lens I would recommend starting with it. Faster f-ratio is always better as it lets more light in quicker, allowing you to reduce your exposure times. I've used the fuji 55-200mm lens and the 100-400 and got great results - but one of the most underrated lenses (which I still need to buy!) is the Sigma 135mm f2 lens. If you look online you'll see tons and tons of people who have taken incredible deep space images using it.
Hello and thanks for this video. I'm an art photographer but just started doing some astrophotography for the perseides last aug 12th and had an incredible pleasure to get a image of the Milkyway. The problem is that I got the virus and will dig into astrophotography. After watching many other videos I finally landed in your channel and it is really great. Fortunalelly I have Fuji cameras for my street photography work (some CCD Phase One MF too fo my seascapes, but as those CCD digital back are not good above 200 iso, max 400 iso, I guess it is better to use my Fuji gears). I don't have the XT4 26mpix sensor but the new 40mpix sensor. This 40mpix sensor is beautiful but of course it introduces a bit more noise (even if it seems to be kind of iso invariant from 500 iso). So here is my question : as I don't plan to buy another camera with bigger pixels, do you think SIRIL can do the same job with those more defined but surely more bit noisy shots ? And would Skaywatcher tracker be able to track as good as it does with your XT4 than with my smaller pixels ? Thanks !
Thanks for this awesome video. I like the quality of my XT20, but it cannot be used with NINA. So stuck with an even older Canon 550D instead. Do you know if your XT4 can do tether shooting with a PC please, Ian?
Hi, great video, I have learned lot of things on it I have one doubt: When I use the fuji zoom for focus I see lot of noise and it is very dificult to get a good focus on stars, I use x-t4 with a xf 70-300 instead of a telescope, what could be the reason for that?
Great video! I got an X-S10 about a year ago, but only recently tried it for astrophotography (mostly in preparation for the eclipse). It's something I had dabbled in before and I was curious if anyone had specifically made a video about deep space with Fuji... was very pleasantly surprised to find yours which was not only super recent but a perfect all encompassing refresher! It's well edited and you do a wonderful job presenting info, easy sub for me. The previous camera I was using was an old EOS 7D and man, all the modern QoL improvements make a night and day difference in convenience. Having saved custom profiles, built in intervalometer, and a flippy screen makes astro so much easier and it makes me actually want to go and do it more often. Now I just need to save up for a star tracker and telephoto lens lol. Do you have any experience using the Fuji telephoto zooms for astro? Any particular recommendations in that category? Hopefully your channel keeps growing, I was surprised you're under 2k subs given the quality of the video! I remember first subscribing to (and learning how to do astrophotography from) Nico from Nebula Photos several years ago when he was like under 5k too so hopefully yours can become as big if you keep at it. And I'd love to see a video teaching how to do the astro timelapse that you showed, I thought that looked really nice and it'd be cool to see how you accomplish it within the Fuji system.
Thanks so much, I really appreciate your reply!! My goal is to get people interested in astronomy, whether it be through astrophotography, astronomy-related comedy, or astro adventures under the stars. I've used the Fuji 100-400, and the 55-200 lenses, and they worrk just fine for astro. I'll always use my telescope over the zoom lenses but I'd recommend any lens that has a fast f-ratio will excel for deep space (which limits the zoom lenses). I've got the Samyang 135 f2 lens for my Fuji on the list of lenses I want for deep space, though!
Re: 16:45 If you're shooting RAF on a Fujifilm X-Trans - at least the X-T1, anyway - and then using Siril to process the images, it literally does not matter what ISO the camera is set to. I tried it out one night - shot a bunch of same-length images at ISO 200, 400, 800 etc and then processed them all. There was just no difference in the resulting image once Siril was finished with it. Note again that this was with an X-T1; I haven't tried this experiment again with my X-T3 which uses a later generation X-Trans sensor.
Always good to have a video that recap the whole process, nice job! I wanted to try using the 50-140 2.8 for astro if he worth it for this peculiar job, but that's a 99% constant cloudy / rainy weather since last October here, I'm sad. Not a single photo for this winter up until now. Yesterday was cool though, we were able to visualize/shoot 12P/Pons-Brooks.
Thanks! I'm with you on the bad weather - I've had a few weeks of rain, got a single night of so-so weather (so I took advantage and filmed this video), now we're back to rain and thunder! Glad you were able to see the comet
Aww man thank-you for this video!! I've got an XT30, and have been falling down the astrophotography rabbit hole. Im not sure I'm ready to commit to a dedicated astro cam, and watching this video has definitely given me my next path to go down, so to speak. A somewhat technical question... your redcat scope there... iirc, you said the effective focal length was somewhere 250mm ? In your opinion, is it better to use a telescope at that 250mm versus the fuji xf 70-300 w the 1.4x tc attached? So, essentially 630mm full frame equivalent. This is kind of my next step in determining what size scope I should go after
Easily 😂 I love telling it to from Polaris over to somewhere like Vega. It moves 3” over to the right and then it says manually move to centre scope ..
Love this Ian! I'm a Fuji shooter for my street photography and always wanted to fully transition over to Astrophotography with one of their mirrorless models so this video was super helpful!
Hello Ian! Saw your video on marketing and selling astrology prints and just started my store thanks to you. I’ve been doing astringent for many years but never had the nerve to put my work out there. Thank you for the inspiration and the knowledge to do so. Thank you again. Luis from NY
This is a fantastic video! I was looking on how to Focus and you do that starting at 14:55 but I don't get anything like your screen!! So, I am not doing deep-sky photos so I do not have a telescope. I am trying to do Milky Way images with a 23mm f/2.8 and it is impossible to focus because of the noise on the screen or even in the viewfinder on my X-T4. So, the viewfinder is acceptable without enlarging, but the stars are too small - so I put in manual mode and the image enlarges (8-10x zoom aprox) as soon as you turn the focus ring. But then, I only see multi-colored digital noise on the screen or even in the viewfinder. Do you have ANY suggestions please
Do you have focus peaking on? Turn it off if so. Make sure you point at a really bright star or planet when focusing. Otherwise you'll have to focus on something that is extremely far away, like a distant treeline, mountain peak, or something of that nature.
@@ianlauerastro much better at 'standard' rather than Focus Peak but there is still quite a bit of digital noise on the screen making it challenging. Not like my old Canon 5D MKII that showed absolutely no noise in Live View! any reason beyond Focus Peak? Should I save that configuration as a setting?
Hi, Love your videos and I can't wait to go out and start taking pics again. I have a fuji gfx 100s and was wondering if this adapter is what I need. Wide (48mm) Low Profile T-Ring for Fuji GFX. Sorry for the newbie question. Thanks!
You'll need a GFX to Wide T/M48 adapter to be able to attach your GFX to a telescope with an m48 thread on the back. Keep in mind you will always have harsh vignetting because most lower cost astrophoto telescopes have an image circle that support (at max) a full frame sensor. You'll have to spend a pretty penny to get telescopes (and supporting equipment) that can support a medium format sensor size.
@@ianlauerastro Thanks for the the info! I see what I did. in the other video you had a borg... $4500... yeah that is expensive. For the telescope above, any recommendation on a dedicated astro camera that you would recommend. Still thinking full frame
@@akikopagkos1 There's a lot to unpack when it comes to deep space astro. Full frame is great, and is doable on the RedCat 51 telescope I use in this video. If you're looking at a one shot color full frame astro camera, I'd recommend the ZWO ASI6200MC Pro camera - it's a beast. Of course you can go down the monochrome camera route with specific filters, but that becomes very expensive with such a large sensor!
Awesome guide! That's cool the Fuji sensors are more sensitive to h-alpha. Are there low-cost Fuji bodies with this quality? Is it any body with an x-trans sensor? I see there are 3 generations now, is it all generations? Like would an X-E1 even work? Seestar is ok but has a really narrow field for having 250mm focal length, would love a simple setup like what you're showing to get much wider shots.
Thanks so much! The older X series cameras (XT1, XT20, etc.) as well as the XE1 you mentioned all use the X Trans sensor, they'll just have lower resolution. I started out with the XT1, then went to the XT20 before getting the XT4 and they have all worked great for astro.
Keep in mind this video can apply to any DSLR or Mirrorless camera, including Sony, Canon, etc. While this video focuses on Fujifilm cameras, it's mostly the specific settings of the camera itself - everything else (concepts, trackers, in-field techniques, image processing) will work with any type of camera!
I clicked on this because it was on my feed because I watch all your videos. I am 73 years old and I have never owned any kind of camera until August 2023. I bought an asi294 camera. Works pretty good.
The ASI294 is a great camera! I hope you're getting some good results. Cheers
Great video, great channel. Already subscribed, looking forward to practice with my same sensor xt30 ❤
Awesome, thank you! I hope you get some good results and let me know if there's any questions I can answer
@@ianlauerastro actually yes: what's the most compact tracker that I can put in a backpack but still works decently? I love in the UK but I'm from the Italian Appennines where my father owns a lot of telescopes so I'd like to have a portable tracker to take around 🤣
@@rezzoc91 Everyone has a different definition of portable 😁
I'd say the Star Adventurer Pro 2i or the iOptron trackers are portable (at least for me and my friends when we go deep into the wilderness).
There's also a mini version of the Star Adventurer that weighs less but holds less weight.
Ian thoughts on mechanical vs electronic shutter for astro? I wanna dabble in some astro but I dont want to throw a lot of money into this hobby and I am not able at this point to invest in star tracker and I also have a lot of light pollution, is it even worthwhile? Would I be able to get decent images of stuff like orion nebula untracked? I have an x-t30ii, xc 50-230 f4.5-6.7, a 18-50 f2.8 and a 135mm f2
With a mechanical shutter you’ll just need to change your interval time between shots to be ~3 seconds. Deep space needs darker skies, so getting any distance from light pollution will help (light pollution adds noise which makes it harder to distinguish your target from the noise of the background sky glow). You can do deep space without a tracker, it just takes many more photos (thousands or even more) and much more effort (especially on your computer!)
Bray Falls and Nebula Photos both have great videos on photographing deep space without a tracker
@@ianlauerastro Thank you for reply, I have looked at dark site finder and the best sky I can get to is like bortle 5, would this be dark enough? I would like to shoot with the 135mm and I think following npf rule I can only shoot for about 1 to 1.5sec if not mistaken, you said I would need probably thousand photos so I would prefer to preserve my shutter, is there any issue with using electronic shutter for astro or do I need to use mechanical? I am new to photography in general
@@nukert658no major difference between mechanical vs electronic - electronic will let you take exposures faster. A bortle 5 is OK but if your target is bright enough (like andromeda or Orion) you should be able to image it with enough photos
Wonderful job Ian! And so glad to see others showing off how easy and capable Siril is for processing our astrophotography.
Nerdy question (and I might have missed it, so apologies if I did): Can the Fuji cameras combine an internal bulb timer with the internal interval timer? It didn't look like you were using an external intervalometer, and you mentioned shooting 50 sec. subs. I've found many cameras have both, but it's impossible to combine the functions so if I want to use the internal interval timer I'm limited to 30s. subs. Wondering if Fuji doesn't have that limitation.
Thanks Nico - Siril is awesome and the team behind it are even more awesome!
The built-in intervelometer on the XT4 lets you do shutters speeds to 15 minutes, and has settings that can do 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 2 min, 4 min, 8 min, and 15 min. These can be used with the interval timer shooting setting which is soooooo nice for astro. The older X-series models don't have that and also require an external intervelometer (I used to use one on my XT1), though I don't remember exactly when they made the change.
@@ianlauerastroThat's amazing! Only other camera I had that did that was the Nikon D810a. Annoyingly even my Canon Ra doesn't have that functionality! Such a silly oversight for their flagship astrophotography camera.
@@NebulaPhotosNico nice to see you here. Hope you can do untracked with Fuji somday. Love yours, Cuiv, Bray and Ian's channels the best.
Oh, that's great. What is the brand of lens you are using? I have a Fujifilm xh2s and I have a 150 600mm lens, which lens should I buy?
The 150-600 is a great place to start! The slower f-ratio will hinder your light gathering ability, but since you've got the lens I would recommend starting with it. Faster f-ratio is always better as it lets more light in quicker, allowing you to reduce your exposure times.
I've used the fuji 55-200mm lens and the 100-400 and got great results - but one of the most underrated lenses (which I still need to buy!) is the Sigma 135mm f2 lens. If you look online you'll see tons and tons of people who have taken incredible deep space images using it.
Hello and thanks for this video. I'm an art photographer but just started doing some astrophotography for the perseides last aug 12th and had an incredible pleasure to get a image of the Milkyway. The problem is that I got the virus and will dig into astrophotography. After watching many other videos I finally landed in your channel and it is really great. Fortunalelly I have Fuji cameras for my street photography work (some CCD Phase One MF too fo my seascapes, but as those CCD digital back are not good above 200 iso, max 400 iso, I guess it is better to use my Fuji gears). I don't have the XT4 26mpix sensor but the new 40mpix sensor. This 40mpix sensor is beautiful but of course it introduces a bit more noise (even if it seems to be kind of iso invariant from 500 iso). So here is my question : as I don't plan to buy another camera with bigger pixels, do you think SIRIL can do the same job with those more defined but surely more bit noisy shots ? And would Skaywatcher tracker be able to track as good as it does with your XT4 than with my smaller pixels ?
Thanks !
my canon R50 will autofocus on stars with no problem but i still use manual when shooting at 50mm it doesn't change much.
Thanks for this awesome video. I like the quality of my XT20, but it cannot be used with NINA. So stuck with an even older Canon 550D instead. Do you know if your XT4 can do tether shooting with a PC please, Ian?
Unfortunately I don't know of any Fuji software that can do that :(
Hi, great video, I have learned lot of things on it
I have one doubt: When I use the fuji zoom for focus I see lot of noise and it is very dificult to get a good focus on stars, I use x-t4 with a xf 70-300 instead of a telescope, what could be the reason for that?
Great video! I got an X-S10 about a year ago, but only recently tried it for astrophotography (mostly in preparation for the eclipse). It's something I had dabbled in before and I was curious if anyone had specifically made a video about deep space with Fuji... was very pleasantly surprised to find yours which was not only super recent but a perfect all encompassing refresher! It's well edited and you do a wonderful job presenting info, easy sub for me.
The previous camera I was using was an old EOS 7D and man, all the modern QoL improvements make a night and day difference in convenience. Having saved custom profiles, built in intervalometer, and a flippy screen makes astro so much easier and it makes me actually want to go and do it more often. Now I just need to save up for a star tracker and telephoto lens lol. Do you have any experience using the Fuji telephoto zooms for astro? Any particular recommendations in that category?
Hopefully your channel keeps growing, I was surprised you're under 2k subs given the quality of the video! I remember first subscribing to (and learning how to do astrophotography from) Nico from Nebula Photos several years ago when he was like under 5k too so hopefully yours can become as big if you keep at it. And I'd love to see a video teaching how to do the astro timelapse that you showed, I thought that looked really nice and it'd be cool to see how you accomplish it within the Fuji system.
Thanks so much, I really appreciate your reply!! My goal is to get people interested in astronomy, whether it be through astrophotography, astronomy-related comedy, or astro adventures under the stars.
I've used the Fuji 100-400, and the 55-200 lenses, and they worrk just fine for astro. I'll always use my telescope over the zoom lenses but I'd recommend any lens that has a fast f-ratio will excel for deep space (which limits the zoom lenses). I've got the Samyang 135 f2 lens for my Fuji on the list of lenses I want for deep space, though!
Re: 16:45 If you're shooting RAF on a Fujifilm X-Trans - at least the X-T1, anyway - and then using Siril to process the images, it literally does not matter what ISO the camera is set to. I tried it out one night - shot a bunch of same-length images at ISO 200, 400, 800 etc and then processed them all. There was just no difference in the resulting image once Siril was finished with it. Note again that this was with an X-T1; I haven't tried this experiment again with my X-T3 which uses a later generation X-Trans sensor.
Always good to have a video that recap the whole process, nice job!
I wanted to try using the 50-140 2.8 for astro if he worth it for this peculiar job, but that's a 99% constant cloudy / rainy weather since last October here, I'm sad. Not a single photo for this winter up until now. Yesterday was cool though, we were able to visualize/shoot 12P/Pons-Brooks.
Thanks! I'm with you on the bad weather - I've had a few weeks of rain, got a single night of so-so weather (so I took advantage and filmed this video), now we're back to rain and thunder! Glad you were able to see the comet
Thank you for the video!
I just purchased the XT3 and already owned the Cat. What is the T ring adapter for this combo? Thank you!
I use the William Optics 48MM T mount for Fuji X
@@ianlauerastro thank you so much for this info!!! Please keep producing videos with content of Fujifilm deep space astrophotography. THANK YOU!
Aww man thank-you for this video!! I've got an XT30, and have been falling down the astrophotography rabbit hole.
Im not sure I'm ready to commit to a dedicated astro cam, and watching this video has definitely given me my next path to go down, so to speak.
A somewhat technical question... your redcat scope there... iirc, you said the effective focal length was somewhere 250mm ?
In your opinion, is it better to use a telescope at that 250mm versus the fuji xf 70-300 w the 1.4x tc attached? So, essentially 630mm full frame equivalent.
This is kind of my next step in determining what size scope I should go after
great video! could you tell us what bortle the sky you shot in was?
Thanks! I’m in a bortle 6, on the border of bortle 7
Easily 😂 I love telling it to from Polaris over to somewhere like Vega. It moves 3” over to the right and then it says manually move to centre scope ..
Love this Ian! I'm a Fuji shooter for my street photography and always wanted to fully transition over to Astrophotography with one of their mirrorless models so this video was super helpful!
That's awesome to hear - I hope this helps and feel free to reach out with any questions, happy to help
Great job, you make it easier than I thought🌈.
Hello Ian! Saw your video on marketing and selling astrology prints and just started my store thanks to you. I’ve been doing astringent for many years but never had the nerve to put my work out there. Thank you for the inspiration and the knowledge to do so. Thank you again.
Luis from NY
Fantastic! Good luck and feel free to shoot me any questions I can help with.
Best teacher….EVER. 🤘
Thanks Tom!!! You rock 🤘
This is a fantastic video! I was looking on how to Focus and you do that starting at 14:55 but I don't get anything like your screen!! So, I am not doing deep-sky photos so I do not have a telescope. I am trying to do Milky Way images with a 23mm f/2.8 and it is impossible to focus because of the noise on the screen or even in the viewfinder on my X-T4. So, the viewfinder is acceptable without enlarging, but the stars are too small - so I put in manual mode and the image enlarges (8-10x zoom aprox) as soon as you turn the focus ring. But then, I only see multi-colored digital noise on the screen or even in the viewfinder. Do you have ANY suggestions please
Do you have focus peaking on? Turn it off if so. Make sure you point at a really bright star or planet when focusing. Otherwise you'll have to focus on something that is extremely far away, like a distant treeline, mountain peak, or something of that nature.
@@ianlauerastro much better at 'standard' rather than Focus Peak but there is still quite a bit of digital noise on the screen making it challenging. Not like my old Canon 5D MKII that showed absolutely no noise in Live View! any reason beyond Focus Peak? Should I save that configuration as a setting?
@@PhilippeLaporta If you have performance boost on it can also add digital noise
@@ianlauerastro i will certainly look into that
Hi, Love your videos and I can't wait to go out and start taking pics again. I have a fuji gfx 100s and was wondering if this adapter is what I need. Wide (48mm) Low Profile T-Ring for Fuji GFX. Sorry for the newbie question. Thanks!
You'll need a GFX to Wide T/M48 adapter to be able to attach your GFX to a telescope with an m48 thread on the back. Keep in mind you will always have harsh vignetting because most lower cost astrophoto telescopes have an image circle that support (at max) a full frame sensor. You'll have to spend a pretty penny to get telescopes (and supporting equipment) that can support a medium format sensor size.
@@ianlauerastro Thanks for the the info! I see what I did. in the other video you had a borg... $4500... yeah that is expensive. For the telescope above, any recommendation on a dedicated astro camera that you would recommend. Still thinking full frame
@@akikopagkos1 There's a lot to unpack when it comes to deep space astro. Full frame is great, and is doable on the RedCat 51 telescope I use in this video.
If you're looking at a one shot color full frame astro camera, I'd recommend the ZWO ASI6200MC Pro camera - it's a beast.
Of course you can go down the monochrome camera route with specific filters, but that becomes very expensive with such a large sensor!
@@ianlauerastro One more question. I swear! :) what tripod are you using?
@@akikopagkos1 recently I’ve been using Slik carbon fiber tripods
Awesome guide! That's cool the Fuji sensors are more sensitive to h-alpha. Are there low-cost Fuji bodies with this quality? Is it any body with an x-trans sensor? I see there are 3 generations now, is it all generations? Like would an X-E1 even work? Seestar is ok but has a really narrow field for having 250mm focal length, would love a simple setup like what you're showing to get much wider shots.
Thanks so much! The older X series cameras (XT1, XT20, etc.) as well as the XE1 you mentioned all use the X Trans sensor, they'll just have lower resolution. I started out with the XT1, then went to the XT20 before getting the XT4 and they have all worked great for astro.