Picture of the moon using telescope's eyepiece and smartphone. Picture of stars using smartphone and tripod
As our host Telvin has explained we are doing astrophotography. Basically that's pictures of the Stars, planets, moons and galaxies and nebulae of our Universe. There are literally so many ways to view the night time sky and I always recommend to at least take a few minutes to look up on a clear night and view that inky black sky with it's pinpoints of light. Now as Telvin has shown us you can take lovely pictures of the moon by just snapping a picture of it. But, how do that without the blurring shake? A tripod of course most times at places like best buy, Target and such you can get a relatively inexpensive but goo tripod, most come with a standard mount that you can screw into the base of camera. For added fun see if you can find a tripod like I did that has a smartphone adapter and take pictures with your phone! Now no matter which way you decide to capture that night time sky you must remember a few important things, find ISO settings and open it, selecting the highest your device goes, next see if you can lengthen shutter speed. Like a telescope your objective here is to capture as much light as possible in a low light surrounding. You can even take pictures by teaming up a camera or smartphone with a telescope, mounts are out there that allow either device to attach to the eye pieces of telescopes and allow you to snap that picture. I still need to adjust mine but I was able to get a decent shot with just holding up my phone to the eye piece. I'll enclose one shot of some stars I captured with my smartphone and tripod as well as a shot of them moon I took through telescope and it's eye piece. No matter what way you do it I urge you all to enjoy our night time skies, in them you look to past, for that is what star light and remember, the Stars we see today our ancestors saw yesterday! #cosmos #astrophotography #lookatthosestars
Thank you for this post! Yes, the trick to astrophotography is stability, but also reduced outside interference such as light pollution and humidity. When taking dim celestial objects, as you said, increase the shutter speed, therefore increasing the exposure time. Additionally, decrease the aperture. This can be done on a standard DSLR camera (Nikon, Canon, etc.). Stability is very important because any shake will distort your image. As you also say, the stars we observe at night were observed by our ancestors. As we and all other stars orbit the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, the constellations we see today won’t always appear that way. We are constantly in motion. Happy astronomy and astrophotography!