Budget telescope photos are out of this world
A Scottish science teacher has revealed how to capture startling pictures of our solar system – using a mobile phone camera and an Aldi telescope.
Stephen Mcallister, who has a scientific background and a long-standing love of astronomy, found the £80 telecope during a supermarket trip.
He says despite the low cost he is stunned by the results.
Stephen began photographing the planets from his Port Glasgow back garden using his telescope linked to his phone.
“When I was fairly young, a lot of interesting things were happening – it was around the time of the launch of the first space shuttle," said Stephen.
“I spent a lot of time outdoors in my teens, and I spent a lot of time fishing and out on my bike after dark. I’d stop and just look at the night sky and appreciate it – you can’t help but admire it. I think that's what started me on my journey to being an astrophotographer.
“Experiences like that led me to get my first space telescope in my twenties. Around that time, we had the most fantastic Leonid shower in the 90s – I’ve not seen anything like that since.
“Then fast forward and it’s the Covid lockdowns, and we couldn’t go more than five miles from our houses. I was doing my essential shopping in Aldi, and then there was this £80 telescope.
“I phoned up a few friends and told them to get themselves down to Aldi because they've got the most fantastic space scopes going at a really good price – and four or five buddies went down that afternoon and cleared them all out. From there, we began doing what we could from the back garden.
“Astrophotography can be quite expensive, so for £80, we were trying to do what we could with that telescope and a mobile phone.
“We were doing live feeds of the planets and people were coming online and talking and interacting – that became entertainment on a Friday or Saturday instead of going to the pub.
"It was lifting folks' spirits, and they were learning about astronomy.”
Stephen still uses his Aldi mount, and has spent a further £200 on additional lenses and tracking motors to aid his work. He has also added a Seestar S50 telescope to his collection.
To take the photographs, he sets his scope up to the correct aperture and orientation, before linking it up to a camera app.
The scope takes snapshots of images in 10-second intervals, with the app stacking the pictures on top of each other to create the full image.
After sharing his pictures online, Stephen was blown away by the reaction from his local community – and people quickly began asking questions about how they could get involved.
“It’s been quite overwhelming that you can be living on a council estate, like myself, and be capturing these images from your own back garden.
"People have been asking to come along, so I'm going to be running events where I can show people how to work the stuff and get the most out of it.”
It became our entertainment instead of going to the pub