Astronomy with a cellphone — in the beginning
I took the picture of the Milky Way rising with my cellphone in early February 2020 from outside the town of Mitzpe Ramon in the Negev Desert region of Israel. It’s a straight off the cell phone picture with no enhancements. The constellation Scorpio is in the center. For those familiar with the night skies and just did the math in their head, correct, it was around 4 AM local time. WTF was someone from the Boston area doing in the Negev dessert at 4 AM? Story for a different day.
Publishing on Medium is the story for the start of what will be several posts. One thing I’ve learned reading Medium articles is they really can’t be too long because I doubt anyone will ever click on the “30 minute read” ones.
My impetuous for using Medium stems from an ongoing series of posts I’ve been making to my local astronomy club’s Facebook page under the Astrophotography with a cell phone from my backyard or Star Party Guy subject title. Facebook is not great for authoring more than a picture and a caption; Medium seems better for short articles with occasional longer rambles. Though these posts will build off of each other a bit and Medium seems more aimed at stand alone shorts.
Why do you want to keep reading this post and the ones that will follow? Maybe you’re curious about space and the few remaining stars you can see from your undoubtedly light polluted home (only a few percent of the world’s population in so called developed countries have a view of the night sky that a few generations ago was taken for granted).
There are lots of great authors here on Medium that can supply the details of the science behind what’s out there so I’ll not be attempting that.
Normally I would be hosting star parties as part of our club’s activities and public observing from the telescope facilities at Merrimack College. COVID-19 has made that impossible for a while and we’re still limited for public events as the virus evolves to take advantage of ignorant unvaccinated hosts.
The articles are aimed at astronomy activities, with some astrophotography with a cell phone to help explain things. Some of the materials will use a cell phone with a telescope, like this one:
Astrophotography buffs will quickly point out that the picture of the Orion Nebula is pretty bad compared to what serious amateurs can do, let alone professional observations or the Hubble Space Telescope. No disagreement from me; the goal here is what you can do with a cell phone that costs a few hundred dollars and you carry around with you. It can do things that were really difficult to achieve not all that long ago.
All astrophotos are heavily processed, whether it’s for artistic reasons or to render scientific value. Unless noted otherwise the pictures here are unprocessed other than what Google has included in the phone’s Night Mode/Astrophotography Mode. Details of the equipment setup used will be covered in the subsequent posts.
