Observing Skills · 11 of 12
Phone Photos of the Night
Can the phone in your pocket photograph the stars?
A phone held still gathers seconds of light: night mode on a tripod, the 500 rule for its lenses, the Milky Way and a conjunction, why zoom fails the Moon, and keeping your eyes dark.
You’ll be able to photograph the stars, the Milky Way and the Moon with a phone, and work out an exposure with the 500 rule.
Before this: Dark Skies, Dark Eyes (6 min)
Where and which night
Working out when this is best placed from where you are…
Where
Kept for this guide only, until you change it here — your map settings, and every other guide, stay as they are.
Print, play outside or present
Scan with a phone's camera, or open
Sources
- Kainz & Murthy, "Astrophotography with Night Sight on Pixel Phones", Google Research (2019) — a phone on a tripod, at most 15 frames of up to 16 seconds each, because longer frames smear the stars into line segments
- Wright, "Astrophotography: Rule of 500 — How Long?", Sky & Telescope — on a tripod, 500 divided by the focal length is how long you can expose before the stars trail
- Apple, iPhone 15 Technical Specifications — Main 26 mm, Ultra Wide 13 mm, 2× optical zoom in, digital zoom up to 10×
- Lawrence, "How to photograph the Moon with a smartphone", BBC Sky at Night Magazine — "digital zoom uses software to stretch an optical result"; reduce the exposure so the disc is not over-exposed
- Fredericksen, "Looking up? Here's how to photograph the Moon with your phone", CSIRO (2026) — night mode can "overexpose the Moon"; adjust the exposure until the craters show
- US National Park Service, "Dark Adaptation of the Human Eye and the Value of Red Flashlights" — rhodopsin takes 20 to 40 minutes, a few seconds of bright light undo it, and a dim red light spares it
- Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, 2nd ed. (1998) — the Moon's distance, and the conjunctions of planets
- HYG stellar database v4.2 — star positions and magnitudes
With a keyboard, focus the sky, aim it with the up and down arrow keys, and press Enter to drop the pin at the centre of the view; or press Show me.