A quick way to understand the basic steps in smartphone astrophotography

Posted on August 10, 2018 by PolyWoggAugust 10, 2018

I’ve posted a few times about my experience with smartphone astrophotography. A person who is active online in this area, Kevin Francis, shared with me a copy of an infographic he did based on his experiences.

You can find the infographic over at:

Smartphone Astrophotography: In 6 Steps [Infographic]

Note that the infographic isn`t meant to give you all the details, but I like his framing:

Choosing your equipment (i.e., pick a smartphone);
Choose a camera app (there are only really two great ones, depends on which OS you`re running);
Use a tripod or mount to make it steady;
Decide if you`re using the phone by itself, marrying it to a lens, or shooting through a telescope;
Capture the image (single shots, long or short exposures, multiple images for stacking, etc.);
Process the images you took.

Is that level of detail going to get you going today? No, but it will tell you the basics you need to know so you can start thinking about what you want to do. Thanks to Kevin for sharing…

Smartphone astrophotography part 9 – DSOs through a long exposure in Camera FV-5

Posted on May 28, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 28, 2018

Earlier I mentioned that when you’re doing your initial camera settings, you could see how good your hardware was by looking at the maximum resolution of long exposures. If it crunches it to a much smaller size than your max resolution for normal shots, you’re kind of hosed for astrophotography. Like me.

But, sure, you can go into program mode. Max out your ISO, boost your duration to 10s or longer (too long and in theory you’ll get star trails), and BAM, a long exposure shot.

Here’s what I get when I set my camera for 10s @ ISO 1600 while looking at M003:

Isn’t that amazing? The depth, the colour, it feels like I could just touch it. A solid black image of nothingness. My sensor will pick up bright single stars (like Spica or something), but it will NOT register a DSO. Most of the time, it won’t even TAKE a picture — it basically gives an error that no picture was recorded. It saw NOTHING, so it took NOTHING. Apparently somewhere in the above there was enough of something for the camera to think there was something there, but nothing visible once processed. It’s also not entirely clear on my old phone if it is doing anything other than simulating a long exposure.

But regardless of what it does or doesn’t do for LEs, it does mean I’m limited to shots of planets or the moon. Maybe some constellations if the individual stars are bright enough. If I want to do more, I need a new camera to work with…

Smartphone astrophotography part 8 – Video in Camera FV-5 / Cinema FV-5

Posted on May 28, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 28, 2018

If you don’t have very good control over your manual settings, or you can’t get a lot of images to stack, one solution that a lot of people use is to say “screw it” and just take a video. Usually the power of the camera drops somewhat by going to video, but what you lack in initial power, you make up for when you take a video. For the ISO comparison, I shot the moon. Some of the manual controls in Camera FV-5 were overriding each other, but still, one way around a lot of short burst images is to do a video. Since Camera FV-5 doesn’t support video directly, I used the companion app, Cinema FV-5.

I shot one of the moon for 90s, and then ran it through the PIPP processor plus Auto-Stakkert. Here is the result, compared with the original single shot earlier:

Single shot	Video processed and stacked

Obviously, something went wrong in the stacking process somewhere, which is part of the challenge of using videos — you have to convert them essentially into frames and then stack them one on top of another to get an image. More art than science at times, and I didn’t go back to find the problem, partly as I’m lazy and partly as it is a bit overkill for a moon shot when the original has a fair amount of detail. If you want more than that, use a real camera!

I also did one of Jupiter for 80s, same processing:

No better than I had done earlier, although the relatively perfect roundness of the planet hints at the power of stacking if you can capture one in the first place that isn’t washed out.

And one of Spica, a single star, for 10s, same processing:

Not very exciting, but it can be done. Normally it would be done with larger fields, but well, my camera doesn’t do that. This is about the best I can get.

Smartphone astrophotography part 7 – ISO control in Camera FV-5

Posted on May 28, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 28, 2018

For any good astrophotography, you need to get out of automatic mode and into more granular manual control. On my old camera, I hit a limit even on ISO control and duration of photos, so even showing ISO elements for the moon isn’t quite so obvious. The app compensates to some extent for the duration to still give me a decent shot, so while you don’t necessarily see the images getting completely washed out with ISO settings, you can see that you start to lose detail (as the app compensates) for the mountain range Montes Penninus about halfway up on the left and the crater collection on the bottom.

ISO – Auto

ISO – 100

ISO – 200

ISO – 400

ISO – 800

ISO -1600

Smartphone astrophotography part 6 – Intervalometer in Camera FV-5

Posted on May 28, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 28, 2018

One nice feature that some people might like in the Camera FV-5 app is a built-in intervalometer. The setting is available from the Shooting Utilities menu on the main screen (looks like a histogram / landscape image of a mountain), and within that menu, is located as the second icon from the right (next to BRK). The symbol looks like the timer icon, but says INT in small letters under it.

The shooting modes available let you choose:

a. Interval + total shots i.e. how often to take a pic and how many photos in total;

b. Interval + shooting duration;

c. Interval+ playback duration i.e. if you turn it into a GIF or video;

d. Shooting + playback duration i.e. if you want to essentially later create slow motion or compressed video;

e. Shooting duration + total number of shots i.e. it will figure out how often to take pics.

For AP, you’re likely to stay in the first one…how far apart to take the shots (likely low number of 1 or 2 seconds) and how many photos in total (100+ is common). Your maximum number of shots is theoretically unlimited (it let me put in 10M shots for instance), but going much above several thousand is going to suck your battery dry and eat up your memory. The interval range is between 1 and 3600 seconds (1s up to 1h).

I ran 100 shots through, but for some reason, the app set my shots on Jupiter at ISO 1000 again, basically guaranteeing overwhelming whiteout of the planet. Stacking that 100 times doesn’t really help with that, just makes it worse in many ways. The app just didn’t give me enough control to bypass that on first go.

Here’s the result, compliments of AutoStakkert:

Nothing special there. But at least Camera FV-5 has the function, something a lot of other apps don’t, and a key tool that most astro photographers need. Saves having to press the button 100 times too. 🙂

Smartphone astrophotography part 5 – Colour channels in Camera FV-5

Posted on May 25, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 28, 2018

Most of the people doing AP tend to say, use the RGB colour channels. Some go hard-core and sample different colour channels separately to give more definition in certain colour ranges, and if you were an expert, you also might want to turn on the visual histogram with each photo. More power to you, if you do.

For me, I am persuaded in part by the idea that shades of gray are not the same as shades of colour, and I would rather have RGB in the mix to make what I get in the image as close as possible to what I see with my eye in some respects. But I thought I would try and see if maybe it would do something on the white balance or other settings. The first is with RGB, the second is “luminance” aka B/W.

RGB	Luminance (B/W)

Hard to tell at the washed out levels, but I would tend to go with the first all the time. If you were into the DSLR or high-end webcams, you’d have a more nuanced view, no doubt, but RGB it is for me.

Smartphone astrophotography part 4 – White balance in Camera FV-5

Posted on May 25, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 25, 2018

There is a lot of conflicting information out there about white balance and what it should be for a setting. Some say set it to daylight mode, as it generally avoids colour challenges where things shift and don’t look right. Makes sense. Another site said however that if I was shooting in an urban setting, I should go for a “colder” setting. I wanted to test it, and the computer over-rode the settings for some reason. My end result looks identical to me:

Supposedly cloudy setting:

Supposedly daylight setting:

Supposedly flourescent / tungsten:

Supposedly incandescent (the coldest setting):

In the end, I can only go by the screen as the outputs don’t tend to help much on this setting. Overall, basically, I would say that the daylight setting is indeed the most realistic. Anything else on the moon either dulled it out (which could be good), or changed the colour (think light blue for tungsten). I just wish I had a better image to show the difference. However, with some of the other limitations, I suspect you may end up using AUTO WB more often than not for within the solar system.

Smartphone astrophotography part 3 – Contrast, saturation and sharpness in Camera FV-5

Posted on May 25, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 25, 2018

When I left off in the last post, Smartphone astrophotography part 2 – The Android app Camera FV-5, I had narrowed down all the big “camera settings” that could affect my attempts from 23 possibles to only 3 real ones to play with or test — contrast, saturation, and sharpness. When I read a bunch of articles online, such as at Astropix.com, the advice basically said:

Set Contrast to “normal” which I took to be medium (i.e. not low or high);
Set Saturation to “normal”, again being medium; and
Turn Sharpen off and fix in processing because while sharpening is nice, the potential benefit is balanced out by increasing the amount of noise.

Two of my other advisors basically said they never do anything with it in the iPhone app, and the other said he just leaves it medium / normal for all three.

However, since everyone tells me that you have to test it “on your equipment” to see what result you get, I set myself up to do a series of snaps…one with everything turned off, one with contrast at medium or high with everything else turned off, one with saturation at medium or high with everything else turned off, one with sharpness at medium or high with everything else turned off, one with all three at medium/normal, and one with all three at high.

Since I wanted to be able to “see” the difference I was getting, I set up on Jupiter and hoped for the best, while trying to set every other feature to automatic. Somewhat ironic, while I was still setting up, I managed to get a shot of Jupiter before I even got going that had faint bands. As an aside, I should also mention I was doing BRACKETED exposure compensation at the same time. I’ll talk about this in a subsequent post, but it basically is a way to do “BURST” mode while adjusting your exposure slightly. The meter goes from -2 to +2 in .5 increments…for those playing along at home, that means a total of 7 settings for exposure. The default is “0” in the middle. Bracketing allows you to do the standard default in the middle, but before it does, it takes some below (negative compensation) and above (positive compensation). I set it to do the full 3F (three shots) with 2 as the increment i.e. -2, 0, and +2. Basically -2 will dim it, 0 will be normal, and +2 would be brightened (potentially too much). The best one for Jupiter was for Auto with a -2 compensation.

Setup luck

It seemed like auspicious beginnings, I must confess, but those were at ISO100 and 1/30s. At the risk of spoilers, the next session didn’t live up to the opening. My opening base in full size looked like this (with contrast set to minimum, saturation set to minimum, and sharpness set to minimum). One of the sites recommended increasing ISO to about 1000 so you could see changes up and down, but it is more in the end about shades of bright white.

As I mentioned,I wanted to show a base of 0,0,0 (contrast, saturation, sharpness) against medium contrast and full contrast to see what impact the contrast setting would have.

Base	Medium Contrast	Full Contrast

There isn’t a whole lot of difference in the three other than as you increase the “contrast”, you actually don’t increase contrast “within” the image (i.e. within Jupiter), you just increase the contrast between Jupiter and the background. It basically makes the bright Jupiter go even brighter. And I thus lost the moons in the progressions. So contrast isn’t going to likely help me much, other than by needing to tone it down, not up.

For the saturation, I wanted the same test.

Base	Medium Saturation	Full Saturation

Now, saturation basically operated the way I expected. The more “saturated” the setting, the more Jupiter was whited out. So it’s not going to help much for already-bright objects, but may hinder somewhat.

For sharpness, same deal as the last two tests.

Base	Medium Sharpness	Full Sharpness

And yet, I’m not sure WHAT is going on in this one. The moons do seem a bit more pinpoint-like in the last one, but at the expense of definition around the edge of the planet.

End result? Not much difference no matter any of the settings, other than that it generally starts to whiten / overwhelm the image as I go much above the minimum. Admittedly, again, it was going to ISO1000 by default, which tends to overwhelm anyway, but even with the compensation at -2 for all of the above options, it wasn’t enough to make the images worthwhile.

I wasn’t quite done though. I wanted to do balanced settings.

Base	All three to medium	All three to full

As expected, any setting above “base” tends to just completely white out the entire shot. I tried one of the recommended combos and even the app’s default settings, but all of them overwhelmed the image. Even the last one tended to boost contrast high enough for me to lose the moons.

Base	Medium Contrast, Medium Saturation, Full Sharpness	App default: Medium Contrast, Medium Saturation, 3/4 Sharpness

I’d love to be able to say, “Hey, now let’s try this with ISO 100” and see what I get, but that wasn’t next on my checklist. In the end, I had three lessons learned:

A. Obviously, ISO1000 will almost always be too high for Jupiter (duh);

B. The contrast, saturation and sharpness can affect the brightness and whiting out of the image, regardless of their intent, and should likely be used exceedingly sparingly for solar system targets;

C. Sharpness had a bigger range, so if I was trying for a DSO where I needed more brightness, I might try shifting an extra 10% sharpness over whatever my saturation and contrast levels were, but for anything else, it’s probably better to just be at minimum.

Ultimately though, it’s easier to just turn all three to minimum and let the other settings control the image settings. Good to know they’re there though if I’m having other over exposure problems.

Smartphone astrophotography part 2 – The Android app Camera FV-5

Posted on May 25, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 25, 2018

One of my goals this year is to take some astro pics of various things – moon, planets, stars, DSOs. And since I have seen people do some amazing things with the same scope as me (NexStar 8SE) and a smartphone, I wanted to try it too. In a previous post, I described it as beginner / entry-level astrophotography (Smartphone astrophotography part 1 – Meade smartphone adapter). I have a Meade adapter to hold the smartphone and some okay eyepieces to use, but getting set up is probably the least of the challenge…while I have managed to get a couple of good shots, I haven’t been very consistent.

I outlined seven steps in my previous post and after fiddling with setups, I managed to mount the phone, adjust the phone to the eyepiece ring, mount the eyepiece, find an object, and adjust the scope’s focus. Five steps down, somewhat mechanical and there’s always likely room for improvement, but it’s good enough for amateur work. Which leaves adjusting the camera settings and snapping the photo or video. If I’m really specific about it, these two actually break into three pieces:

Set the general camera settings
Set the individual image settings
Record the image or video

For iOS phones, you use Night Cap(ture); there are other apps but anyone having any really serious luck with their iPhones and a scope is generally using this app. For Android, the popular choice is Camera FV-5; as with iOS, there are other choices, but most people are defaulting to this app. Both are popular because you can change camera and image settings out the wazoo, which you need in order to get beyond basic settings and into astro-photography configs for low-light.

However, when I looked at the camera settings, I hit a wall. In Camera FV-5, there are *23* settings that could directly impact my type of astrophotos. TWENTY-THREE of them. While the general advice is a bit of trial and error, and making a checklist to run through all the different types of options, 23 is way too many. With all the sub-options, etc., it would be hundreds of permutations. So I needed to triage the list to a more manageable size. I reached out to Lokifish and FlyingSnow on Cloudy Nights, Loren on Cloudy Nights and on FaceBook, and Andrew through Twitter. Most of them are using iPhones, not Android, and different software, but my initial camera questions were a bit more generic than that, not specifically limited to iPhones or Android i.e. not really limited to smartphones. To be honest, I think they are more about astrophotography in general, and in addition to consulting the four people mentioned above, I did a LOT of online searching to find people talking about the same issues. I tried the even tried the RASCAG group too but no nibbles. But with the various avenues, I managed to weed the initial list of 23 down to just 3 to keep for a checklist experiment. If you’re thinking of trying the software, click on the settings icon, and here’s what you will find:

A. Under Basic Settings tab:

Irrelevant: Storage location, custom storage folder, and geotagging are more about your own personal interests, not the outputs, and you might as well turn the composition grid off too.
Mostly irrelevant: I initially set maximize screen brightness to OFF, mainly as a question around preserving my night vision (there’s a lot of white on the screen and no app-based night mode to turn everything red). However, for some darker sky options, I wanted the screen as bright as possible to show any stray photons. It doesn’t affect the photos, just your viewer, so it’s more personal preference.
Relevant: But you SHOULD set Image Resolution to the maximum size you have available as you want as much light and information in the photos as possible. You should also note the maximum size shown as it will be relevant in another section in a minute.

B. Under the General Camera Settings tab:

Irrelevant: Set review last photo, review time, sound (3 sub-options), hardware controls (2 sub-options), use double back key press, and prefer external applications to whatever you want to for personal style, as none of them affect the photos. Anti-banding sounds impressive until you actually see the sub-settings — it is basically about Hz ranges, which might sound relevant until you see that there is a setting for Europe and USA. What is it? It’s so you don’t take a pic of a TV screen and see bands on it. I hit disable.
Mostly irrelevant: Under “compatibility”, you will see six sub-options that are highly technical and their “grouping” doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. “Keep AE-L/AWB-L after focus and shoots” doesn’t affect photos but it DOES allow you to set them once and keep it set, rather than any resets after each shot. The next three work together — if you use a bracketing procedure (we’ll come to this later but basically it takes three to seven photos at a time, sequentially like a burst, with slightly different exposure compensation), then these three options will affect how well that tool works (i.e. pausing between exposures or not, how long the pause should be, and whether you want it to refocus between shots — generally not for the last one because you’re going to be setting it to infinity later anyway for every shot). You can also set the metadata mode (1,2,3) and while metadata is important when you’re comparing photos, I couldn’t find ANY explanation of what the difference was. “2” seemed to have more info in the file than “1”, but that might have just been coincidence. I set mine to 2. The last sub-option is called “Force usage of legacy camera driver”. I can’t imagine a practical normal reason you would ever want to do that — in almost all cases, older camera drivers are going to have less features and produce worse photos than the current driver. I would make sure it is turned off unless you know a specific reason for your phone’s model in particular that makes you want to switch it. Meanwhile, back under the main settings, there is one called “focus before capturing” but since you’re going to set it later to infinity, it can be switched off. The next option also asks if you can take a photo without focus, which is kind of stupid as it just asked the same question. If I can turn it off, why do I want to ask it again? I switched it on (first one says yes you can take photo, second one says actually take the photo?).
Relevant: The first sub-option under main heading is the only real one that is relevant, and not for the reason that first appears. It is called “Long Exposure Resolution”. Like with Basic Settings / Image Resolution, this is asking you what resolution you should use. Again, for astro photos, you generally want the biggest one you can get with the most detail. So while that seems like a no-brainer, I’m flagging it for another reason. On my phone, my Max Image Resolution is 12MP (chosen in the section above), but my max Long Exposure Resolution is…wait for it…2MP. Why? Because my phone’s camera sucks. I’m using a Galaxy Note 3 that works great for just about everything else but the sensor is so old, it’s going to drastically limit me for certain types of astro photos. It also means that although the software may SAY it’s doing a long 20s exposure, it looks like that is more of a “simulated” long exposure (taking smaller shorter exposures and stacking them together). I’ll cover this in more detail with my actual image reviews, but you should know right up front, if this says you’re limited to a much smaller size, it means your expectations for pics of anything outside our solar system should be limited.

C. Under the Photo Encoding Settings tab:

Irrelevant: Photo storage and numbering (four options) are irrelevant to the image, just personal preference.
Mostly irrelevant: Choosing to embed the thumbnail in the JPG doesn’t affect your image quality, but you may want it when reviewing and sorting photos later. I switched it off, but my consultative advisors recommended leaving it on. And you might as well have best quality (100) for the thumbnail. Similarly, picture orientation (2 options, both of which I leave off) and MetaData (I include EXIF +XMP) are just personal preference.
Relevant: There are four relevant ones left, but two of them are intertwined and obvious. The first one is the file format — on almost all Android phones, this is going to be JPG or PNG. I prefer JPG, doesn’t really matter. What matters is if you have a third option to do RAW. If you do, I am highly jealous. The RAW format is your gold standard and what most hard-core astro-photographers use for imaging. Just like most any other serious photographer for other subjects. But you likely won’t have the option, so choices after that are pretty obvious. If you choose JPG, you will want the highest quality level (again, why not?). The setting, “SET IMAGE PARAMETERS” (for contrast, saturation and sharpness), is actually highly-relevant, and while you only set it once generally, I’m going to cover it in the next post with the image checklist options. Finally, the setting for “COLOR CHANNELS” isn’t as exciting as some astrophotographers might hope. Often, APers, will take shots with Reds, Greens, and Blues separately (no, I don’t know hardly anything about it) to capture different light spectrums and then merge them later. It gives them more granularity of control in the final combined photos. However, this one only has two options — RGB i.e. in colour or Luminance i.e. B/W. While B/W might be tempting, people tend to get more realistic photos in colour.

D. Under the Viewfinder Settings tab:

Irrelevant: This whole section is relatively irrelevant for the images, just your own preferences in working the screen. Widescreen is preferred by some, I tend to leave it off; I check the “DO NOT TURN SCREEN OFF” because it’s annoying in the middle of setting up and checking some info in a book or something to have the phone turn off, reenter the pass code, get it back to where you were. Of course, leaving it on sucks battery life. Since I don’t do image rotation either, I leave the viewfinder in landscape mode on mine.
Mostly irrelevant: Under Viewfinder Overlaps, there are two options that are useful — SHOW STOPS DISPLAY (i.e. exposure compensation) and SHOW CAMERA PARAMETERS (i.e. show your settings on the screen before you snap). Focus Assist sounds like it could be relevant, except you’re not manually focusing with the camera, you’re doing it with the scope. Your phone is set to Infinity.
Relevant: The Histogram settings could be useful, I have no idea how to use them though, so I don’t bother. If you can get a good image of something on your screen, reviewing the histogram would let you tweak it even more, but that is beyond my ken.

And that’s it. All the main options eliminated or set, twenty relevant ones addressed, and only three that carry forward to my next post of testing different things with a checklist approach.

Smartphone astrophotography part 1 – Meade smartphone adapter

Posted on May 19, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 25, 2018

One of my goals this year is to take some astro pics of various things – moon, planets, stars, DSOs. While some people take shots of the sky with just their cameras, in my limited experience, there are four ways to capture images through a telescope.

1. DSLR mounted on the back of the scope (for my setup anyway), looking through the scope;

2. Webcam in the eye-piece;

3. Point-and-shoot camera mounted on the back of the scope and looking through the eyepiece; or,

4. Smartphone mounted at the eyepiece.

Regular Astrophotography

When people talk about astrophotography (AP), they normally mean option 1 or 2.

Option 1 is considered the best option by most amateurs, not because you get the best visuals, but just a combination of cost and quality. DSLRs are awesome machines with proven technology to capture photons. You can even get ones that have modified sensors explicitly to improve capturing night skies with limited light.

Option 2, the webcam, is great if you can afford the high-end cameras but even the lowest end requires another piece of equipment — a laptop to capture what the webcam is seeing. Lots of people debate Option 1 and 2, and while you might get agreement that “technologically” the high-end webcams will produce better output, you’ll likely never get agreement on what is better or easier to work with for a given individual or at a given price-point.

Beginner’s Astrophotography

Option 3 for a point-and-shoot camera was created by people who wanted to take some photos but didn’t have a webcam/laptop or a DSLR. There are little adapters that you mount the camera on, hold it in place over the eyepiece, and bam, you can take a photo. It is, however, highly finicky to adjust everything and get in place to take a shot. I never had much luck with it myself, but I gave it a try, just as I tried the other two above as well. Some people found it just as easy to hold it steady above the EP as anything else.

Option 4 — the smartphone — was basically a simple modification of Option 3 and has grown out of the desire of many people to do exactly what they are doing for regular photography instead of using DSLRs … take shots with the camera they already have on them rather than lugging something else.

Early adopters simply held the smartphone up to the eyepiece, and snapped shots. I’ve done this myself, and got a couple of okay early shots of the moon, but anything else was beyond me. I just can’t hold it steady enough. I also don’t have the patience.

Moderate adopters bought simple adapters that came out from various manufacturers and basically gives a series of little clamps to lock on to your phone in one part and an eye-piece in another. Sounds simple enough, but it’s misleading. For one thing, all phones are different sizes so the phone clamps have to be adjustable i.e. not exactly perfectly sized or lined up. Particularly because some phones put the camera in the corner of the back, others put it in the centre, others in the opposite corner, etc. So after you mount the phone to the adapter, you have to centre a mounting ring over your eyepiece to get it lined up (most newbies make the same mistakes I have done which is to try and centre the camera over the eyepiece rather than first centreing the eyepiece ring over the phone’s camera port, and then adding the EP last).

Current adopters are excited by seeing some of the great work that is out there (like Andrew Symes’ on Twitter — @FailedProtostar) and seeing just what is possible. For these adopters, and to some extent the others, you quickly divide into two camps: iOS users and Android users.

iOS — Those with recent iPhones are blessed with two things. First, the iPhone cameras are good, solid cameras. Are some of the new Google Pixel, or Samsung cameras better? Doesn’t matter, really, the point is that the iPhone cameras are good and have decent abilities to alter the options/settings since night-time photography at a telescope eyepiece is not your “default” setting for any common camera. However, they get a second benefit. There’s an app called Night Cap(ture). It exploits the benefits of the iPhone’s abilities to the max, and just about everyone who uses iPhone for night shots don’t even bother to try anything else. It’s the default go to app, and produces awesome results.
Android — Within the Android world, all the cameras are different: some support API1, some API2; some have great cameras, some have good; some let you play with settings, some don’t; some will save in RAW, most won’t. But even without the variations in the hardware, there is no clear winner in the app world on the scale of Night Cap. If you go by popularity, probably Camera FV-5 comes the closest, and it has lots of power. Although it doesn’t include a video mode, that’s a separate app. Sigh. Anyway, the point is, it’s just not as robust or streamlined as the iOS option. Just about everyone out there who is doing AWESOME stuff out of the gate is using iPhone. Despite the larger Android market share, I would say “awesome smartphone AP” is about 90% iOS and 10% Android.

Enough context, what am I doing?

I tried webcam stuff, but it was something I pushed to the backburner after a few tries, with the intent to focus on visual observing until I felt that I had that well-covered. Five years later, I don’t have it nailed, although the alignment process is fixed. I tried DSLR and have all the parts, just haven’t quite nailed the process and setup yet, but again, put it to the backburner. The point-and-shoot option is still on my list once I nail smartphones as I would like at some point to take four images of the same thing(s) with all four just to show what I can get with a bit of practice and minimal skill.

Which leaves me in the beginner’s AP world of snapping photos at the eyepiece with my Android phone running Camera FV-5. I tried a bunch of other apps, none were even close to giving me what I want on my Samsung Note 4. I can’t save in RAW, but I’m fine with JPGs. I’m aiming more for souvenir web photos than printing enlargements or giant murals. I’m getting a few shots, but nothing spectacular, and it’s hard to figure out where I need to make my improvements. There are x steps in the process.

Mount the phone in the bracket.
Adjust the phone to the right height and angle of the eyepiece ring.
Find an object in the scope.
Mount the eyepiece ring over the eyepiece, thus mounting the camera.
Adjust focus of scope.
Adjust settings for camera.
Snap the photo or record the video.

Step one: Mount the phone in the bracket

That sounds like it should be easy enough, right? Except here’s the deal. I have a Meade smartphone adapter and it basically consists of a “U-shaped” holder, you lie the phone flat in it, and then squeeze the U thinner to pinch the sides of the phone. A small screw knob (1) underneath tightens to hold it perfectly in place. Except there’s a small variance with the next step.

(from bintel.com.au)

Step two: Adjust the phone to the right height and angle of the eyepiece ring.

So here’s the deal…the eyepiece ring has an inner bracket that clamps on to the eyepiece and an outer bracket that connects to the phone bracket. A screw knob (2) holds them together.

To align the phone at the right height above where the eyepiece will be, you use screw knob 2 which allows the phone bracket to move up and down in height about half a centimeter. Screw knob 1, which holds the U together, also allows the horizontal phone to move forward / back and left / right in the bracket to allow it to centre itself over the eyepiece ring.

In other words, you have to keep both knob 1 and knob 2 loose enough to allow movement but tight enough that everything stays together. Grr…

(from Amazon JP)

Step three: Find an object in the scope *

I confess, this is NOT the next step in my process, but I’ll talk about that later.

Usually, this is the normal next step. Pretty straightforward. Locate something in the scope that you want to image, put it in focus, get it tracking if you have a tracking scope.

Step four: Mount the eyepiece ring over the eyepiece, thus mounting the camera *

Again, this is not my usual order, but the standard one. With EP in the scope, and the camera phone mounted on the adapter, you then place the adapter on the eye-piece, tighten it up, and it’s installed. You hope.

Step five: Adjust focus of scope

When you did your initial focus, it was to see the object in the EP. Now that you’ve got a camera a bit above the EP lens, you need to tweak your focus a bit. A friend uses a magnifying glass to make sure his stars are pinpoint sharp. Others eyeball it on the screen as they adjust the focus knob.

Step six: Adjust settings for camera

If the camera isn’t already set for the right settings — infinity focus, duration and ISO — then you can set them now.

Step seven: Snap the photo or record the video

With everything looking perfect on the screen, time to record the video or snap the photo. Since most phones will shake a bit when you touch them, lots of people use a 2 second timer delay for the shaking to stop or a remote trigger or even voice controls.

* My modified steps

I essentially swap steps three and four. Normally you use the EP to find an object and then mount the camera on top. In my case, I have an extra EP, so I first mount the EP I intend to use to the camera and THEN find an object with the other EP. When I am ready, I swap the EP+camera for the spotting EP. Just saves a few steps on the fly and increases the likelihood that my EP will stay attached.

How am I doing?

Not that well. Way back when I started using the adapter last summer, I could get an image like this:

This month, I was lucky to get this:

I tried for Jupiter. Last July, I got this:

This May, I was lucky to get this:

I fiddled, I adjusted, I tried again:

Some people have been doing video and converting, so I did two 10s videos, ran them through an astroimaging software to process them for stacking and then through an actual stacking program, plus converted to JPG. This is the best I have so far:

I moved on to DSOs and got nothing. Totally black images. I checked the sensor to see if it was even registering stars, and I managed to capture Castor:

But it is hardly pinpoint and there is nothing showing around it? Seems odd to me.

So I’m messing up somewhere in the seven steps to get from A to Z. Just not sure where yet. I’ll keep trying.

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Category Archives: Photography