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Orion Nebula


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Great pics. Can I ask what phone/settings you were using? I took some last night with 8” Dob and a Pixel3 using astrophotography mode but was having to stop the capture after a few seconds to stop overexposure and rotation.  This was best I got but yours seem much crisper/sharper.

89AA6953-777F-4AB1-90E5-B9FA4DD58688.jpeg

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The first picture is made with a Zhumell 118mm Spotting Scope at 30x, with a Samsung Note 9. I took around 180 Light frames, 120 Dark frames, no Flat frames and i reused the Bias frames from the second pic. 
The second picture is made with a Meade ETX 70, im not sure about the eyepiece, and the same phone. The light frames were 2 seconds because it would start trailing more than that and 800 Iso. I took around 120 Light frames, 100 Bias frames, 100 Dark frames, 20 Flat frames and 20 Dark Flats.

I think for the image quality to be better you should use the pro mode, if the phone camera has it or use a third party app that allows you to manually control the settings and also shoot in RAW format. When using the pro mode its also important to manually adjust the phones focus so that it is on infinite and doesnt move while you're taking pictures. For the exposure time its basically trial and error, take a pic and adjust the exposure till you see round stars no trails. The note 9 has an advantage that it has the s-pen and i use it as an intervalometer sorta, i can press the button and it will take a picture without having to touch the phone and shaking the setup, but you can get an intervalometer app or can buy one for cheap online if you wanna get a bit more serious about phone astrophotography. Hope this helps, if you have any other question feel free to ask :) .

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Thanks very much for such a detailed reply - much appreciated.  It explains a lot though as I'd assumed your shots were single images (or night mode style integrated "stacking").  It never even occurred to me that you could use a phone for that many images or use flats etc.  I'd only ever been tempted to do something with video.  

Now I know the work and effort you put in I'm quite happy with mine 🙂   I may be lured to the dark side of proper astrophotography eventually but for now I'll stick with point-and-click type images on my phone adaptor.  But after your comment I'll give manual  settings on the phone camera a go next time the skies are clear... sometime around 2023 I reckon.

Thanks again for all the info.

Edited by Girders
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Well considering that is a single pic taken through your phone, imagine what you could create with a couple of them properly stacked. My single pictures look really dark and you cant really tell if the Orion nebula is there, so if you used a stacking technique you might get really great results. It doesn't take that long to do, probably about an hour all for all ,couple of Light Dark and Bias frames and stacking to get amazing results. Try sequator for stacking if its your first time using stacking software and i can PM you the parameters i use for stacking.
Have a good day and hope the skies clear sooner.

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Thanks - and for the tip about sequator as I hadn't come across that before.  Unfortunately (for astro stuff anyway) I'm a Mac user which is the other reason I've kept away from imaging as there seems to be a definite lack of Mac stacking software.  And time.  And technical skills.  Which is why I stick to the single shot stuff.  But please do PM me the settings you used and I'll maybe have a go over th Christmas break as I'm considering sticking a Windows partition on my Mac.  

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Awesome shot, admittedly it was quite a while ago but I was using what was then considered to be state of the art Astrophotography kit and my best shot of M42 was on a par with your image👍

Olly, your CCD clearly needs to be on 5G.☺️

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I had a go last Saturday when we had a rare spell of clear weather. First is a single image taken by eyepiece projection (26 mm) through my old 200 mm SCT using the "Night Mode" on my Samsung Galaxy S10. The second is the result of stacking 8 similar images using Deep Sky Stacker and faffed around a bit on the phone's photo editor. I was surprised to pick up blue and red colour, and the trapezium is only just overexposed (effectively the exposure time per shot is 20-30 sec). 

20201212_214125.jpg

20201213_110115.jpg

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I'll contribute a couple. These were taken a few days ago through my Google Pixel 2 [Night Sight mode] with my Takahashi FC-100DF, AP MaxBright, and Pentax 10 XW.

I increased the contrast in pic 2.. I wasn't sure which I thought looked the best, so I saved both.

 

 

orion10xw.jpg

orion10xwhc.jpg

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