Imaging objects directly overhead is considerably more difficult. I shot a star field that includes Orion and Canis Major, since they rise above the eastern horizon in January. Positioning the touch screen at head height, pointing horizontally, simplifies the learning curve. I use a standard camera tripod and attach the phone using a cheap adapter that you can buy for about $10. Magnifying Glass - Zoom Camera Flashlight. (Also, TIF files are an order of magnitude larger than JPGs.) Binoculars 45x Zoom HD Camera PHOTO And VIDEO is a free app for Android. It will let you shoot in TIF files, which is important because the bit depth is much greater, giving you more editing headroom.
ProCam gives you manual control over your phone’s settings. Can the native iPhone camera do any of these? No! I downloaded an app called ProCam to do this. In essence all you need to take a picture like this is manual control of the focus, a 15-second time exposure, and a RAW file output. And don’t forget to enable airplane mode so an incoming message doesn’t vibrate your phone! First configuration: iPhone on a stationary tripod Here are three different ways to photograph the night sky using an iPhone and some software and hardware hacks. But that’s okay, because I made a device that virtually anyone can make in a garage or workshop. Unlike Steve Jobs, who reportedly invested $150 million to develop the iPhone, I had, well, considerably less.
The alignment and interface hardware needed a little work but I had the background from my career as an optics technician at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope and Subaru telescopes at Mauna Kea, to work out a robust optical interface design. This idea is called afocal imaging or eyepiece projection. I guessed that the iPhone camera lens would approximate my eye and, if placed correctly behind the eyepiece, would refocus the magnified image onto the focal plane of the camera.
The first photo I took was of the full Moon through a pair of binoculars. The iPhone 6+ had been introduced the previous year and it had all the bells and whistles a photographer could want, including a 5.5-inch screen and an 8-megapixel color image sensor to print 8” x 10” photos at 300 dpi. I bought my first smartphone in 2015, which makes me a very slow adopter. That doesn’t mean you can’t use your phone for astrophotography! The sky is the limit, providing you’re willing to invest a little time for what is a surprisingly low-budget, hands-on project. Many of those phones came equipped with impressive cameras, yet as far as I know, a smartphone image has never shown up on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website. Global smartphone sales topped 1.5 billion last year.