CATEGORY
Astrophotography
One degree per second: the Space Station with a phone
It arrives on schedule, crosses the sky in minutes and does not come back. How to plan, frame and blend an ISS pass with nothing but a smartphone.
Your phone sees the aurora before your eyes do
A grey cloud above the treeline that doesn't drift like a cloud. The sensor hands it back green: why that happens, how to forecast it, how long to expose.
A star as wide as the Moon: the Sun with a phone
The only star you can shoot at noon, and the only one that can blind you. Filters, exposure, and how many pixels the disc and its spots really cover.
Star trails with a phone: when the blur is the subject
Your phone will never hand you an hour-long exposure, and you do not need one. Star trails get built by keeping the maximum instead of the mean.
Nothing up there is white: white balance for night skies on a phone
Your phone guesses the light source in a scene with no neutral surface, and guesses again every frame. How to lock it, and what colour work waits till later.
Seeing is not your problem: reading an astronomy forecast with a phone
One phone pixel covers seventy arcseconds and seeing is worth two. Which row of the forecast actually decides your night, and the order to read them in.
Finding the target: aiming a phone at something your eyes cannot see
Andromeda spans six full Moons and stays invisible to the naked eye. Degrees measured with your fist, a scouting frame as a finder, wide-angle star hops.
Your stack is finished and the picture looks black: stretching explained
The sensor counts photons in a straight line, your eye does not. How to open up a stack's histogram without clipping the faint stuff or bleaching the stars.
Meteor showers on a phone: the one night stacking works against you
A meteor lasts under a second, and averaging three hundred frames erases it. How to shoot a shower with a phone, and how many trails you will really keep.
Jupiter is three pixels wide: shooting the planets with a phone
On your phone's telephoto lens Jupiter covers three pixels. The real numbers, afocal shooting through a telescope, and the two minutes before it rotates.
How many seconds you actually have before the stars start to smear
The sky moves 15 arcseconds a second and one phone pixel covers seventy of them. Here is your real exposure ceiling, lens by lens, and how to test it.
Cold, dew and a dead battery: the night is working against your phone
Below freezing a phone shuts down at forty per cent, and the lens fogs without warning. How to get the handset, and the session, through to dawn.
Darks, bias and flats on a phone: what is worth calibrating
Your phone already measures its own black level and knows its vignetting. That leaves bad pixels: when darks earn their keep, and when they waste your night.
RAW or JPEG on a phone: what the software throws away
Your phone rewrites the sky before it shows it to you: noise smoothed, suspicious dots erased. What RAW hands back, and when it is actually worth it.
Focusing on stars with a phone: why autofocus gets it wrong
In the dark, autofocus has nothing to grab onto. How to get your phone to true infinity, lock it there, and catch the night quietly shifting it again.
