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Taking Photographs with the
SteadyPix EZ and Your Smartphone
The higher the camera sensor's resolution, i.e., the more megapixels it has, the better your
smartphone photos are likely to be. That is, an 8MP camera should produce a sharper,
more resolved image than a 2MP camera. If your phone has a flash, make sure the flash
is turned off when shooting through a telescope eyepiece!
Use exposure delay, also called a self timer. The vibration from the tapping the phone
to take an image is enough to cause blurring of the image, if the exposure occurs
immediately. Having a delay of a few seconds between the screen tap and the onset of
exposure eliminates the problem by allowing any vibration to dissipate prior to image
capture. If your phone's native camera function does not have an exposure delay feature,
there are plenty of third-party camera apps that do.
Moon: Our closest neighbor in the solar system is dazzling through even a very small
telescope. The SteadyPix will allow you to take beautiful images of the whole Moon or
close-ups that showcase the craters, mountains, or maria (Figure 7). Single snapshots
work well and multiple shots can be stacked later in a program such as Registax to
increase the signal-to-noise ratio and dynamic range of the image. Also, you can take
video and then stack a series of the sharpest individual video frames.
Bright Planets: The bright planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn also make excellent
targets for afocal photography. Try using a higher power eyepiece and maybe a Barlow
lens to boost the magnification – planets are tiny objects in the sky! You'll need a steady
atmosphere, i.e., good "seeing," to get sharp planetary images. The smatphone's display
will allow you to show off your target object to friends and passers-by—no waiting in line at
the eyepiece!
Deep-sky Objects: Most deep-sky
objects are difficult to photograph using
a smartphone. Try working with brighter
objects such as M42 (Orion Nebula) or M13
(Hercules Cluster). You will likely need a
mount that tracks the motion of the sky so
that you can take "long" exposures using a
3rd-party app that offers that capability (try
Slow Shutter by Tomoki Kobayashi), and you
will have to stack multiple images to get a
good final image.
Sun: If – and only if! – you have a proper
solar filter to cover the front of your
telescope, you can get terrific images of
sunspots on the surface of our nearest star in
the daytime with your smartphone. Sunspots
are constantly changing, so shooting them is
always interesting and a lot of fun.
Nature/Terrestrial: The SteadyPix EZ can
be used to take through-the-telescope photos
and videos of distant subjects in daylight.
Figure 7. Lunar close-up taken with iPhone 5s
mounted in a SteadyPix EZ attached to an 85mm
refractor. Magnification: 112x.
7
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