One of the hobbies I've become obsessed with of late is learning more about astrophotography. When I was working from home last year for a few months due to COVID, I started watching a ton of YouTube videos on the side. I watched everything I could: videos about UFOS, Bigfoot, Bitcoin hashing, living in the van, living in trailer/rig, defi, Hellier, and anything else that caught my interest during the day. Then one day, a YouTube channel called Astrobackyard caught my attention. I started the series from the beginning, and I was hooked.
The idea is fairly simple; take amazing photographs of the night sky from your backyard. It's a romantic notion to think that one can take a photograph like this one from one's backyard:
Of course, the more you watch the video series, the more you realize you need quite a bit of startup capital to buy equipment. You need to get a good telescope, a good mount (one that tracks the sky, of course...don't even think about a static mount), and a good camera that can be modified to fit your scope. That's part one. Then you need to research software that removes light pollution, fits various waves of the EMF spectrum to optimize the photograph, and provides for other slick editing features that create an image like the one above. Oh yeah, and above all else, all of that costs a bit of money.
These deep space objects are absolutely gorgeous: Thor's Hammer, the Orion Nebula, the Crab Nebula, the Wizard Nebula...etc. etc. etc. Hey, I want to do this too! Yet, let's be realistic; I'm not going to go to my wife and tell her "hey sweetheart, I need USD 4-5k to start on this hobby from scratch" while in the midst of a global pandemic. I might be a dreamer, but at times I can still be a realist. With that said, I came up with a new plan:
- I'll keep watching these YouTube videos
- I'll keep dreaming about being an astrophotographer
- I'll consider being an astrophotographer when a) my cryptos blow up in value and/or b) I retire from work
Easy enough, yes?
Then two weeks ago I found this image :
What have we got here? A photograph that was taken by a smartphone? That's pretty cool. And I just bought a Pixel 5 after my Pixel 3 contract expired...I wonder if that has a similar ability to shoot the night sky?
So I used the trusty Google Machine and started researching. With the research came some good finds on YouTube, and then came a few small purchases to get started. I was well on my way to starting this hobby on a very small scale, yet at the same time what I hoped to be satisfying. Here's how the past few weeks went down:
- The Pixel 5 has a great astrophotography function (duh...where have I been with Pixel cameras the past few years? I swear technology gets the better of me all of the time, and I miss out on too much stuff)
- I found this YouTube channel : Shayne Mostyn - Mobile Photography - a great channel dedicated to astrophotography generated by both iPhones and Pixel phone cameras (a great find I'd recommend to anyone else interested in this hobby with some great hints and tips to take photos)
With a game plan in place, I then went ahead and bought a camera phone tripod (a must for mobile astrophotography), the mobile app called Stellarium, and started looking for dark sky areas near to me. Here is my new "rig" as of last week Tuesday night:
Not quite this:
But hey, it's a start. My new sky viewing location came way via the site lightpollutionmap.info and some research on the local university's astronomy club's favorite site to watch the night sky. A possible first site to start this new adventure was now all in hand and reachable; a public park near a small town only 20 minutes away from our house called Middle Ridge:
Check, check and check...and we also had a new Moon as of last week; a perfect time to make the trek after Hattie went to bed and start shooting the night sky with this awesome Pixel, tripod, and the Pixel's astrophotography functionality. How is easy and amazing is this going to be? I know it's not the same as deep space photography, but it was going to be a fantastic start.
Are you excited to see the photos I got? Well me too, except it's currently Sunday, and we have had nothing but cloudy skies this past week. How does this upcoming week look? More cloudy skies, with maybe a chance at clear skies on Saturday. Which of course means that the first day of clear skies possibly will be contaminated with a First Quarter moon. How awesome are January Wisconsin skies???? Super awesome! I love it..,
And that moon photo I took above? Well, that was a nice little trick I learned on that smartphone astrophotography channel I found. Looked pretty good, didn't it? I thought so too, but here was the setup.
Try to fake it until you make it, right?
Yet don't fret (at least I'm not going to). I am definitely going to get some photos of the stars and start publishing on Hive as soon as the clear skies start rolling in. I'll share my first bunch of photos with everyone here (it's the least I can do after this big tease today). And I can't wait for the Milky Way night sky to get back to the skies of Wisconsin, starting this summer.
I'm curious, too, if anyone else in the #weekendengagement community is an astrophotographer? Any tips or hints that I could use on my smartphone to get started would be greatly appreciated! Any photos or pictures you'd be willing to share to give me some inspiration? And if you are a heavy-duty, deep space photography type of person, I'd love to hear how you got started and would love to see any shared photos you'd be willing to post on Hive.
Thanks as always for stopping by and checking this out. I promise I'll have photos up for part II as soon as I can. Hoping everyone had a great weekend out there.