Astrophotography With A Smartphone: Stellarium, NightCap, Lunar Pictures

A smartphone is now a usable astrophotography camera for several common targets. The moon, the bright planets through a telescope, the constellations on a dark night, the International Space Station, and even the bright nebulae are within reach of an iPhone 12 or newer and most flagship Android phones. The hobby is called smartphone astrophotography, and the gear list is short: the phone, a free app or two, a tripod, and optionally a small adapter that clamps the phone to a telescope eyepiece. A senior who already owns the phone can start tonight for about 40 dollars.

Three free or low-cost apps cover almost every shot. The first is Stellarium Mobile, a free planetarium app at stellarium.org. Stellarium tells the user exactly where any target will be in the sky at any time, which removes the guesswork of pointing the camera. The second is NightCap Camera on iPhone, at nightcapcamera.com, which costs 3 dollars and adds long-exposure modes for stars, star trails, satellites, the ISS, meteor showers, and the aurora. Android users can install Camera FV-5 or the free version of ProCam X for the same long-exposure features. The third is the phones own native camera app in Night Mode. Modern iPhone Night mode and Google Pixel Astrophotography mode automatically stack a four-minute exposure of a starry sky into a clean image. The Pixel mode requires a tripod and recognizes the dark sky on its own. The iPhone Night mode runs up to 30 seconds on a tripod.

The moon is the easiest target. A full or gibbous moon photographed with a regular phone on a tripod, zoomed in 2x or 3x, produces a sharp image with visible craters. A phone clipped to a telescope eyepiece with a 30-dollar Celestron NexYZ adapter produces National Geographic-quality moon photos at any phase. The technique is called afocal photography. The user lines up the phone camera with the eyepiece, taps the screen to focus on the moon, and presses the shutter. Bright planets like Jupiter and Saturn are harder because they are smaller in the field. They show as a clear disk through a telescope eyepiece, but the phone records them as a bright dot unless the magnification is at least 100x. Constellations, the Milky Way, and meteor showers are best shot with the phone alone on a tripod with NightCap or Night mode. Sources include stellarium.org, nightcapcamera.com, celestron.com, skyandtelescope.org, and the NASA Spot The Station tracker at spotthestation.nasa.gov.