Ursa Major - 20th April 2020

[Stu]

I was out looking for the Starlink pass last night, and decided to pop my phone on a little tripod and see what it would do on a longer exposure.

This was a 30s shot using night mode on the iPhone, then tweaked to reduce the background and bring out the stars a little. The second version has more faint stars but that makes it harder to see the shape of Ursa Major; I checked the the faint stars are indeed stars, not noise!

The third unprocessed shot just about shows a trail from one of the Starlinks towards the bottom right. Any attempt at processing makes it disappear, so this is what the raw shots of the others looked like too.

 

 

 

[Paul M]

Better than I managed with my DSLR while out at the same time. Took a load of 30s exposures at 18mm f/l of Leo and Ursa Major after messing with focus for longer than it should have taken. Anyway, all so far out of focus they won't even stack and there's loads of camera shake even though I used self timer to try and avoid exactly that. The whole lot got binned! Flipping flipping mirrors!

Having another go tonight but taking the lappy armed with APT to run the camera.

Glad I'm not an imager, I'b be really bad at it 🤣

Edited April 21, 2020 by Paul M

[JeremyS]

That’s interesting @Stu

is the time exposure using the standard iPhone camera app. And can you go longer than 30 secs?

[Stu]

20 minutes ago, JeremyS said:

That’s interesting @Stu

is the time exposure using the standard iPhone camera app. And can you go longer than 30 secs?

Yes the standard iPhone app on my 11 Pro allows up to 30s in night mode.

ProCam 7 seems to have a Bulb setting in its slow shutter mode, but I’ve not tried that out yet.

[KevD65]

On 21/04/2020 at 20:02, Stu said:

I was out looking for the Starlink pass last night, and decided to pop my phone on a little tripod and see what it would do on a longer exposure.

This was a 30s shot using night mode on the iPhone, then tweaked to reduce the background and bring out the stars a little. The second version has more faint stars but that makes it harder to see the shape of Ursa Major; I checked the the faint stars are indeed stars, not noise!

The third unprocessed shot just about shows a trail from one of the Starlinks towards the bottom right. Any attempt at processing makes it disappear, so this is what the raw shots of the others looked like too.

 

 

 

Hi, I'm new to the forum, but have been tinkering with iphone imaging for a couple of months. Can I ask you what software you used to process your images, as the results are great and I'd love to be able to do something similar myself. Also do you have any links to good guides for beginners attempting iphone astro imaging, or any good books on the subject? 

Edited April 26, 2020 by KevD65

[Stu]

2 hours ago, KevD65 said:

Hi, I'm new to the forum, but have been tinkering with iphone imaging for a couple of months. Can I ask you what software you used to process your images, as the results are great and I'd love to be able to do something similar myself. Also do you have any links to good guides for beginners attempting iphone astro imaging, or any good books on the subject? 

Welcome to the forum Kevin.

If you have a look in the Smartphone imaging forum there is plenty of advice and examples of what people are doing:

https://stargazerslounge.com/forum/279-imaging-smartphone-tablets/
 

I use two apps for processing. PS Express works very well for planetary and lunar images I find, whilst Snapseed is excellent for curves adjustments to reduce background brightness and bring out fainter nebulosity.

In terms of capture, I found the Pro mode on Android worked very well, but on iPhone I more usually use ProCam 7 which  gives good control of exposure. That said, the night mode on iOS now allows up to 30s exposure which really helps to capture more stars.