Full disc with phone

[Sunshine]

Yes, my laptop is in the works, but in the mean time, being an insatiable tinkerer as I am I figured I’d see how far I can take cell phone solar images.

Ive been trying different techniques and apps to grab stills from video, this is my first attempt without any fancy stacking which I will will try next, there was horrible atmospheric turbulence. Rising heat made the sun looke like it was underwater but regardless I think there’s potential for some decent photos from cell phones, yes they’re color and ultimately miss 75 percent of the resolution but it’s not too shabby!

 

[MarsG76]

Not too shabby at all.. which phone?

 

[Sunshine]

Iphone 6S, i used a telescope phone grip, then searched out apps that will allow for grabbing single frames from video (video 2 photo app) from app store, i tested several such apps but this one allows you to go through a video frame by frame by tapping left or right arrow.

While zoomed in you can see while tapping through frames which frames suddenly pop with better detail, then with another tap you can save that frame to your album, once you've tapped away and saved many frames im assuming you can edit and process them. I only edited a single frame on my phone as i did this while my wife was yapping away about me finishing her kitchen cabinet reface lol, it is just a trial with one frame only and not what i intend to try which is a stack with editing done on my adobe software. While filming the shot i had to carefully adjust exposure on the phone with the exposure slider as the phone kept trying to adjust itself for a washed out disc, i kept finger on exposure slider and made adjustments while recording. I think once i have a bit more time to edit in photoshop for detail, choose better frames, better seeing also, and figure out how to stack my images i know i can do better, in the mean time ill squeeze every drop of imaging potential i can from my phone, the B&W shot i did some quick editing in lightroom just now.

I forgot to mention about focussing, it was very hard to know when i was focussed on the phone screen, so i figured that i should find a spot i thought was best focus then i racked the focuser in and out past that point slowly. I reasoned that if done slowly while filming there would be a percentage of frames which will be focussed instead of filming the whole video out of focus.

[Pete Presland]

Fabulous especially for a phone!