Today I have remarkable photographic news.
It starts pretty slow. Monday was dex day, so I decided to go out and look for the Milky Way again. I took it a little more seriously this time, driving out to Joshua Tree for some good night sky, but in the event I stopped a little short at a place called Whitewater Preserve. As it turned out, the night sky was good but not great on Monday, and the Milky Way was down very near the horizon. Since it was also in the southeast, that put it right above the light dome from Palm Springs. This is the best I could get:
Even with a lot of editing in Photoshop, the light from Palm Springs was too strong to allow much of a view. You can see a bit of the galactic core, but that's it.
So I drove back down and then remembered that I had forgotten to give my cell phone a try. It's a Pixel 6 with "Night Sight" and I was curious to see what I could get from it. So I retrieved my cell phone bracket, got the phone attached to the tripod, and pressed the button. At that point, I was out from behind the shadow of the mountains and even closer to Palm Springs, which should have made things even worse. But after chugging along for four minutes, here's what it gave me:
This has also been edited, but it's pretty remarkable nonetheless. The phone seems to expose different areas separately, which is how there's a bit of color and detail in the foreground.
The resolution of the phone is still considerably worse than my camera, and if I could ever figure out how to do image stacking properly I could get better results from the camera. Regardless, though, this is a surprisingly lovely picture from a tiny cell phone.
And here's another thing. The wind was so strong at the foot of the mountain that it kept blowing the tripod over. But the software in the camera was smart enough to know that whatever it was seeing after it got knocked over was obviously not meant to be part of the picture. So it removed it. This meant that it only got about 90 seconds of light capture instead of four minutes, but even that was enough to produce adequate results:
This is no great shakes, but it's not ruined either. All in all, an impressive performance from a little cell phone.
I see in the middle picture you have discovered the alien landing zone from 1953s The War of the Worlds. I've sure Covid will take them out.
If only the Pixel had the Galaxy Note writestick option. I would say that overall the Pixel series (well, the later ones) are the best phones on the market in terms of lack of bloatware, technical support, etc. But I need that stylus; among it's many attributes is the magnify option.
After some practice, I've gotten pretty good results from Sequator. My favorite lens is a 12mm f/1.4 Panasonic DG Summilux. That's 24mm in full frame terms, and I typically expose for 15 seconds at ISO 3200. 10 shots plus dark frames, or more stacked gives me a pretty good file to work with in Lightroom.
Shoot in RAW,
Stack in RAW,
Stacked image is TIFF
Then futz with the white balance
Next with exposure
Then push shadows a bit.
Then highlights.
This gets me a colorful image with pretty sharp stars, although I am planning on getting a tracker soon. I recently got one of the new whizzbang Olympus OM-1 (digital) cameras, and it has a much better sensor, but it will be a while before Sequator supports it, so I will probably have to add in the Adobe DNG converter to my workflow. OTOH, the new sensor has much better behavior at higher ISO's, so I'm looking forward to shooting at 6400 or even 12800 once the roads clear and it stops snowing!
wow that is very cool. i guess I do not need this indie go go scope -- https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dwarf-ii-smart-telescope-astro-nature-photography--2#/ (only $329 though)
I order my p6p when I get back from my next trip. Nice to see it works well for you.