I took about 30 raw 30s exposures from my phone propped up on the roof, stacked them with deep sky stacker, and I’m impressed at the result.
Holy shit, is that Andromeda in the upper right quadrant?
It is :P
To be honest I don’t know. I haven’t seen it enough to verify that.
Nor do I, but it’s hard to imagine you captured anything other than the largest galaxy in our local cluster with just an iPhone. That’s one hell of a shot. BTW, that thing is a quarter billion light years away.
This looks awesome. Can you link a detailed instruction? I think it would be cool to recreate.
I didn’t really follow any specific instructions, but here’s what I did:
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Point the camera towards whatever you want to take pictures of. Try to use the raw mode to capture as much detail as possible.
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Take as many pictures of said place as you want. I took about 30, but more images = less noise in your processed image. Since I used my phone for these, I used scrcpy to see and control the device over usb adb, mainly because I didn’t want to accidentally move the device it while trying to take the next picture.
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To process the images, I followed this tutorial on YouTube.
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Post processing the image was done in gimp. The tif files deep sky stacker exports are usually wayyy too dark, so you’ll need to adjust the brightness.
Pro tip: try to keep trees and other landscape out of the frame of the photos because deep sky stacker tracks the earth’s rotation, meaning the landscape will be blurry.
Do you know the tools to track/find the object of interest in the sky ?
I’ve been meaning to take on astro photography but always intimidated by the post processing stuff.
Take a look at stellarium. It’s an app that uses your phone’s compass to show a map of the stars. I’ve not used it as my phone has a god awful compass so the map is inaccurate.
sounds straightforward enough. Thank you so much!!
No problem :)
Here’s how noisy the image would have been if I used one frame with a higher iso instead of 30 of them
Also remember to find a spot with less light pollution so that more stars would be visible.
Oh yea and the software runs in bottles under wine on Linux. Just say no to automatic updates when it asks as that causes some funky behaviour.
Sadly, I think my camera has some partially dead pixels, I’ll see
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A friend has been filling me in on his journey doing the same thing. He got to the second to last photo in a set and hit an out-of-memory error last week. He went from 32GB of RAM to 96GB. I think I’ll see lots more cool images of the night sky soon. :-)
Jeez those images have to be huge. My stack took about 5 minutes to complete on a low end laptop with 16gb of ram.
Yeah, he’s a photography nerd. I dunno what equipment he’s using, but I know he spends a good amount of money on it.
