Having a cell phone means you’re never without a powerful astronomy tool. Despite thinking that celestial scenes are too difficult to photograph, the opposite is often true. That’s because, for the past 15 years, higher-quality phones have come with relatively fast lenses and the built-in ability to capture long exposures. This lets you experience some astronomical events with greater clarity and color than what you’d see with just the naked eye.
There’s always been a disconnect between what the eye can observe and what cameras can photograph. In many cases, the eye is superior. This starts with a camera’s restricted field, which makes it inappropriate for wide-open events like meteor showers. More importantly, direct telescope views of the moon and some planets convey an impact and awesomeness that no photograph can reproduce. Visitors to our observatories routinely exclaim, “Oh my God” or “That’s not real!” upon first observing Saturn. But when shown the clearer, more detailed magazine images taken by the Cassini orbiter or the Hubble Telescope, no one ever makes loud, involuntary exclamations. The in-person view somehow conveys an ineffable impact — a punch. So photography often falls short of the live celestial experience.
But the opposite is sometimes true. A camera can materialize phenomena the eye simply cannot see. Of course, it also memorializes special events visible both digitally and in person, such as lunar eclipses. One such recent phenomenon unfolded early Friday morning, Sept. 19. Just before the brightest part of dawn, the waning crescent moon closely met the brilliant planet Venus and Leo’s blue star Regulus to form a wonderful triple conjunction. (One way to learn about such events ahead of time is through my detailed pages in the Old Farmer’s Almanac.) Using their cell phone cameras, many in our region captured that glorious conjunction.
Even more useful is when the camera shows things the eye cannot see. This year, our region enjoyed many displays of the northern lights. While what we see here in New York state rarely equals the highly animated, visually colorful displays that parade overhead in places like rural Alaska, such super auroras can indeed occur over the Hudson Valley and Catskills. We had an all-night, all-sky example on March 13, 1989, and one a few summers earlier, too. Ours, however, are rarely bright enough to show obvious color, though striking reds were indeed visible here during this past year. In all cases, however, structure within the lights, as well as the typical green hue, comes out vividly through photography. Indeed, whenever you see an odd faint glow in the northern sky, the quickest way to verify it’s an aurora is to hold your cell phone up for half a minute and check out the photo. Your camera will almost always display the telltale green auroral color of glowing oxygen, while your eye only sees it as gray.
The trick to bringing out astronomy detail with your cell phone is to open the camera app, go to pro mode, manual mode or night mode, and then brace your phone on a windowsill, car hood or ideally on a tripod to hold it steady for a 30-second exposure. Make sure you turn off the flash.
Try this the next time you see a suspicious nocturnal glow. You may be happily surprised.
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