Cygnus widefield with my Pixel6 on tracker & DeepSkyCamera app- a bit over 1h exposure

[pipnina]

Sadly I never got this to the point where I was happy to add it to the recently closed phone imaging challenge. But I felt like I should share the best result I could tease out of it anyway!

Despite how sharp the camera on this phone is, I could never overcome the ultra-harsh vignetting and super-hot pixel count. Not to mention colour balancing which always lent itself to be weirdly green, and manual stretching of the RGB channels in pixinsight only allowed me to correct this somewhat. The vignetting I originally planned to solve with flats, but alas they would always over-correct for reasons I am yet to discover. perhaps internal reflections (the moon causes issues for sure if present) or maybe some automatic business that even deep sky camera doesn't have the ability to control, such as white balance?

In the end I did what I could with it. Marginally pleased but would have still been embarrassed to enter it into a compo personally!

Perhaps a new challenge of the sort will appear next year or the year after and by then I will have ironed out the issues I see with this phone as an astrocam. Who knows?!

[Nik271]

Well if anything it shows the limitations of even the best phones out there. It is actually pretty good effort for a phone! But imagine how much better will even a DSLR be in this situation. There is a reason asto cameras are still in business.

Edited October 3, 2022 by Nik271

[Paul M]

I was playing with my Galaxy S20+ at my dark sky site this weekend. This is the best of the bunch, 20 sec at ISO3200. I managed to plate solve it using ASTAP to give some idea of what's where.

Not in the same class as yours .

[pipnina]

2 hours ago, Paul M said:

I was playing with my Galaxy S20+ at my dark sky site this weekend. This is the best of the bunch, 20 sec at ISO3200. I managed to plate solve it using ASTAP to give some idea of what's where.

Not in the same class as yours .

 

For what it's worth, it seems like the phone may have done some denoise whereas my images were all in DNG RAW format, which helps immensely!

And I also had the benefit of an hour of 17 second exposures and not just 1! Also, quite excitingly, these phones are getting better at an astonishing rate. Have a look at what the Samsung S22 can do for milky way shots on youtube and be amazed!

Here's what a basic stretch of a single sub looks like, I took a screenshot of it too so it's a bit low res but you get the idea!