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First moon shot - Help with over-glare


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Hey guys,

Took my scope out for the first time on Thursday night :)

I tried an afocal (correct me if this is the wrong term) shot of the moon using my Samsung Galaxy S2 against the optics (25mm EP, no filter).

Sadly the shot I got did not relate to my wonderfull view. The pic my phone captured shows a moon that is just a fuzzy ball of very bright light (total over exposure wash out) - it really just looks like the sun!

I thought nothing of it, thinking that my phones camera may just not be suited for this kind of AP. However, I saw another SGL member had made a very nice pic with his iPhone 4. Now I am fairly sure the Galaxy S2 has a better camera than the iPhone - so I am now convinced it was user error.

I will try and post my dismal effort later but atm I am not at my PC so can't load the image. Suffice to say it really does look like the sun. I don't know where I went wrong as the focus seemed.very crisp :-S

Any thoughts on how I can do better next time?

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You can buy mounts for afocal imaging that might help. I don't think they're particularly costly. Don't know if they'd be suitable for a phone camera however. There may be only one way to find out.

James

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i am brand new to all this and determined to do a bit of AP along with just staring at the stars - but being a yorkshireman it has got to be free!

I appreciate what others with vast experience have said about webcams only being suitable for planetary work - as they just dont gather enough light to do DSO, but the camera on my mobile is excellent. 8mp with the ability to record in full 1080p HD. I reckon it could be a winner on both planets, moon and dso with a bit of thought and the use of registax etc.

This has got me thinking about using it for afocal pictures/HD video through a 25mm and 10mm ep. But i aint gonna stretch to buying one of those phone mounts for £60 - as thats what it cost for my celestron 130 newt second hand! (told you i was yorkshire :-) )

So i am going to fashion something out of a bit of thin ply board with a hole cut in it the size of the camera lense - hold the phone on with some elastic bands and mount the board to a piece of threaded bar so that it can be raised or lowered and rotated left and right to get the right position from the EP (dont know the fancy name for that) and the other end of the threaded bar attached to a right angle bracket that is strapped to the OTA with an ota ring. To stop shake when taking the picture - my android phone (motorola atrix) has a timer, press the button and then 10 seconds later it takes the shot. I think that should be adequate to allow the phone and scope to settle before it takes the piccy. As for video, i can always edit out the first 5-10sec of shake before putting it in registax or avistax etc.

Keep going sharpe!!! us n00bies may not have the knowledge of the others on here, but we have modern technology and a fresh approach from 'outside the box' and I reckon good results can be had with mobile phones.

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I'll be genuinely surprised if you manage to get reasonable images of DSOs other than perhaps the very brightest ones (and quite probably not even those) by such a method.

James

who knows? Yes the sensor size is (much) smaller and this will surely make a difference - but the technology of image processing with better chipsets and software on the devices will surely make some inroads into the quality of the image at higher ISO settings? Plus you get more pixels per mm2 on the newer cmos sensors than you used to get on the early DSLR cameras that had full 1" sensors.

Worthwhile experiment either way.

I'm itching to get some bits together and have a go now.

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Increased pixel density is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, sometimes it's a bad thing because you can struggle to get enough photons on a single pixel and the camera's sensitivity suffers. I'm sure it will work for the moon and you may even get some planetary footage though, so I don't think you'll be wasting your time.

James

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i got this photo of the moon with my htc one x, but, it did take a little trial and error...

8149119982_460016e169_c.jpg

i'm guessing your phone uses the android operating system like mine?

in the settings for the camera try manually setting iso to 100 and if you're able to, set the exposure compensation to -2 (found in settings/image adjustments). that's what i did.

after trial and error i managed to work out where the phone needed to be placed to get the camera to line up with the eyepiece, then i just took as many shots as i could in the hope one of them was in focus.

i neatened the image up in photoshop, but, i could have achieved just the same using free photo editing software like gimp.

good luck!

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