Astrophotography With Your Phone
Today, I want to talk about simple astrophotography that you and do with your smart phones. It is surprising how much the modern phones can capture in the sky.
On Sunday evening, November 5, the Catawba Valley witnessed a mild aurora or northern lights. It caught the local astronomy community off guard but because we had smartphones, many of us were able to get reasonable pictures of the event.
Most phones now allow long exposures. This is necessary to capture faint objects especially aurora. The aurora may be almost invisible to the naked eye but a few seconds of exposure can capture it.
Many people shared pictures with the local television weather folks and our astronomy groups and social media pages. This is exactly what everyone should do.
Besides aurora, modern smartphones can capture satellites like the International Space Station, the Chinese Space Station, and Starlink strings. You can also capture the stars and other objects such as the Milky Way.
The key thing to remember is the phones will capture a lot of ambient light. Streetlights and city glow have always plagued astrophotos and the new phones are no exception. Try at all costs to avoid aiming in the direction of artificial lights.
If you try to shoot the Moon, you will need to zoom in. Otherwise, the Moon will appear as a dot. Full Moon will show no detail because it is so bright.
In addition, never ever point your phone to the Sun! You will destroy your phones camera.
Once you capture images on your phone, you can use some of the photo editing features to bring boost the exposure, contrast, and color saturation. Be careful and don’t overdo the enhancements. Play with these extremely powerful features.
Finally, there is a groundbreaking new type of telescope on the market just for astrophotos. There are several different brands available and the incredible thing is that you control absolutely everything with an app from your phone!
We have five such scopes in our astronomy club. Visit Lucile Miller Observatory and you can use them!
Visit www.catawbasky.org for more information.