5 planets in the evening sky — with a little help from your cellphone

In October and November 2022 — after 9PM in October and by 6 PM in late November you can look up in the sky from East to West and photons from reflected sunlight from Mars, Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune, and Saturn will arrive at your eyeball.

Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are readily visible and you won’t need any help to perceive those photons. Or if you prefer, perceive the electromagnetic waves. What we call light is neither particles nor electromagnetic radiation; those are just the awkward terms we use to describe a thing that is both and neither.

That level of detail obscures the experience of connecting with the other planets in our solar system. The light your eye receives has gone from the Sun to the planet and back to you. While you can’t go to the planet, in some sense the planet has come to you.

The light from Uranus is very faint — you would need to be at a true dark sky site with no (light polluting) man made light sources within 60 miles. In the US, East of the Mississippi there’s only 6 places to find actual dark skies.

Luckily you don’t need to travel, binoculars will capture enough of the photons from Uranus and focus them into a enough arriving per unit time for your brain to say that phrase every school kid snickers at: “I can see Uranus.”

Neptune is too faint to see without some sort of optical aid; how much help depends where you are. From rural and not badly light polluted suburbs (Milky Way visible) 35mm binoculars should work. With more light pollution 50mm binoculars might be needed, along with higher magnification which may mean you need to mount the binoculars on a tripod.

If you have a cell phone with an astrophotography mode (see the earlier articles for details) you can let your phone capture those photons for you. To create this first picture the cellphone was placed on a tripod and 11 pictures taken. Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor was used to stitch those images in to one.

If you’re new to astronomy planetarium software can help you identify things, or you can also use one that offers a web version, such as Stellarium.

Panorama captured with Pixel 3a and no extra lens about 25 miles north of Boston, whose light dome you can see to the south, in the direction of the tallest light tower. The dark vertical area are an artifact from the simple stitching of individual pictures. There is no other processing applied, i.e the grey background is what light pollution looks like from where the picture was taken. To see the stars click image for fullsize view.

Unfortunately Image Composite Editor (ICE) is no longer available but you can find the final version (2.0.3, 2015) on the Internet Archive site. There are other programs that do image stitching but ICE is easy to use and does give some control over the process. One problem is there can be barrel distortion in phone cameras and the stitching algorithm will have a tough time on the starfields. Capturing some of the horizon helps. For this panorama two photos needed to be cropped to get the stars to align.

The pictures in this story are not further processed to remove the sickly grey background from light pollution. While processed pictures make for an interesting photo, what you see in the picture here is closer to what you will see from a typical light polluted suburb.

Previous picture with annotations for the planets. Click image for fullsize; you may need to download and open the image locally to enlarge it enough to see the planets. The small grouping of stars between Mars and Uranus is the Pleiades. the 3rd closest open cluster to Earth. Click image for fullsize view.

In this capture Uranus is easily spotted. However Neptune was not captured despite previous success with this phone. The 60 mm lens was added and the panorama redone. This meant sacrificing having the horizon in the picture as with the lens the field of view is smaller; it would have taken quite a few more pictures to stitch together a view with the horizon and the planets. I doubted the ICE program would figure out how to stitch together a grid of “star only” pictures vs. a single strip that could be laid end to end.

Panorama with Pixel 3 and 60 mm lens and stitched in ICE, no other processing. Click image for fullsize view.

We can compare Uranus and find it easily in both the original (no lens) and second (phone with 60mm lens) view.

Magnified section of original panorama. Pleiades on left, Uranus marked on right. Click image for original.

Magnified section of second panorama created with 60 mm lens attached to the phone. Click image for original.

While the sky background does appear darker (which is expected) there are not a lot of additional faint stars visible.

Looking back at the panorama we can see the effects of the camera’s vignetting on the individual photos that make up the panorama; it appears as dark vertical regions with a rounded shape. This is a function of the phone camera/lens design. It takes an awful lot of compromises to create a phone that takes pictures versus a real camera.

In well lit pictures the phone software can compensate for vignetting and other limitations brought about by the physics of a small optical system. For astrophotography there’s no hiding from these problems.

The Pixel’s Astrophotography mode doesn’t know what to do with the bright background; the same picture from a dark sky site would show more stars. If this picture was processed further some additional stars could also be “brought out of the noise”.

Uranus ended up in one of those darker, vignetted regions so there is no improvement in sensitivity in that area of the picture. It’s OK though because Uranus was bright enough in both pictures for the phone to image it.

Neptune was a different situation. It too is not in the center of one of the pictures that make up the stitched composite. A few additional fainter stars were detected but Neptune remained illusive.

Magnified section of original panorama from Pixel 3a without the added lens. Marker where Neptune should be. Jupiter is in upper left. Click image for original.

Magnified section from Pixel 3a with lens attached. The magnitude 7.2 star marked was not visible in the first picture, and is here. Neptune was magnitude 7.7 so for the conditions that this picture was taken under it remained out of reach, it should be at the ? marker. Click image for original.

It’s assumed that a combination of vignetting and light pollution have left Neptune just out of reach by half a magnitude. From a darker sky location the Pixel 3a, with the lens, has been successful in imaging Neptune.

Binoculars still offer you the chance to perceive those photons on their almost 6 billion mile journey from the Sun to Neptune and back to your eyes on Earth.

Even if you can’t perceive Neptune in the sky those photons are still there for you.