Camera Question - Astronomy Mode - How To Get It?

[Gator5000e]

I could be wrong but I thought during the iOS 15 presentation (or the iPhone 13 release event), they said there was a mode for taking pictures of the sky at night. Is there a special mode for this or is it just setting the shutter exposure time to maximum in night mode? Cause if it's just setting the shutter exposure to maximum, that doesn't seem like much of an astronomy mode to me. Any clarification would be welcome. Thanks.

 

[gwhizkids]

I think you are thinking of some of the pre-WWDC speculation about iOS 15 featuring astrophotography updates. To my knowledge, there were no specific updates for astrophotography. That said, the iPhone does a fantastic job with astrophotography already, particularly if you use a tripod. If its steady mounted, its capable of 30 second exposures, which is plenty of time to get Milky-Way shots.

 

[Gator5000e]

Wow. Thanks for the clarification. But I’ve never seen anything close to a 30 second exposure. How do you turn that on?

 

[Jumpie]

Wow. Thanks for the clarification. But I’ve never seen anything close to a 30 second exposure. How do you turn that on?

In Dark Mode, adjust the slider at the bottom from 3 secs to whatever that max is.

 

[azhava]

 

[Ninjaman]

Damn that looks good

 

[Jumpie]

You don’t need a tripod. It’s just needs to sit on a surface that’s stable. I’ll try early tomorrow morning if the moon isn’t too bright.

 

[Gator5000e]

I’m jealous of you guys who can find a place that dark and have a great view of the stars and planets.

 

[Jumpie]

I’m jealous of you guys who can find a place that dark and have a great view of the stars and planets.

I live in a pretty dark spot but there’s still some light pollution. But I do get great night sky when there’s no moon. I did try a pic of the Milky Way the other day. It turned out ok but the moon was just too bright. Here it is and Orion and Pleiades too. Not the best but ok.

 

[gwhizkids]

You don’t need a tripod. It’s just needs to sit on a surface that’s stable. I’ll try early tomorrow morning if the moon isn’t too bright.

You don’t but it will work best if you do have one.

I assume the YouTube video shows how this is activated. If not, the phone detects when it is motionless and then makes the 30 second exposure available. That’s the hard part: selecting 30 seconds from the Night Mode menu without shaking the phone enough to lose it.

 

[Jumpie]

You don’t but it will work best if you do have one.

I assume the YouTube video shows how this is activated. If not, the phone detects when it is motionless and then makes the 30 second exposure available. That’s the hard part: selecting 30 seconds from the Night Mode menu without shaking the phone enough to lose it.

Yea. There’s no way I can hold it steady for 30 seconds let alone 10 secs.

 

[Gator5000e]

I guess you could put it on a stand and use an Apple Watch, if you have one, to take the shot using the watch.

 

[Jumpie]

I guess you could put it on a stand and use an Apple Watch, if you have one, to take the shot using the watch.

Yea I figured this one out

 

[w5jck]

Any so-called astro nightsky photos taken with such a tiny camera will be rather low quality. They might look okay on a small screen like a iPhone or iPad, maybe even on a small computer monitor, but they won't look that great on a 65" 4K TV set. Nor will they look good when printed to a size large enough to hang on a wall in a house. You can scale down the sensor and the lens, but you cannot scale down light photons. Those tiny cameras with their tiny sensors just cannot gather enough light for really good night sky photos. Not on their own anyway. They will likely gather less than 3% of the light from a similar setup that has a full frame sensor and full frame lens. Aperture numbers like f/1.8 or proportional only. An f/1.8 lens from a full frame camera has a physical aperture that has a 35x larger physical aperture than the one on a smartphone camera with the equivalent size of FoV (field of view). So that means the full frame camera can capture 35x more light than the smartphone camera when both have the same FoV and both have the same f number. Plus the full frame sensor has bigger pixels and more of them. Bottom line is this, the physics will highly limit the smartphone camera because yes, in this case, size does matter!

However, if you have a nice telescope with an eyepiece on it, which of course gathers huge amounts of light, and you place your smartphone camera right up to the telescopes eyepiece and let it focus on that image, then you can take some decent astro photos. They still won't compare to using a camera with a much bigger sensor, but they will look really good. We call that "digiscoping".

 

[w5jck]

Since my previous post, a teardown of the iPhone 13 Pro has been posted and the new camera turns out to have a 1/1.7” sensor. Yes, that number is confusing, so basically it means the sensor is 12mp with a 4/3 ratio and 1.9um pixels. Long story short, it means the new sensor is a bit larger than the older iPhones had and the sensor diagonal is 9.5mm. So the physical area of the main camera aperture is a bit larger too, but still tiny compared to a full frame camera. If you compare the area of the aperture of the iPhone 13 Pro/Max main lens at 26mm eq. and f/1.5 to that of a full frame 26mm lens at f/1.5, the full frame lens gathers 20.6 times more light. That is a bit better than the older iPhone camera lenses, but still way too little light to be effective for astrophotography on a meaningful level. Plus image quality from a tiny sensor only 9.5mm in diagonal would be really bad compared to the much larger full frame sensor with a 43mm diagonal and at least twice as many pixels. Again, with cameras size matters, especially when taking low light photos.

 

[gwhizkids]

Any so-called astro nightsky photos taken with such a tiny camera will be rather low quality. They might look okay on a small screen like a iPhone or iPad, maybe even on a small computer monitor, but they won't look that great on a 65" 4K TV set. Nor will they look good when printed to a size large enough to hang on a wall in a house. You can scale down the sensor and the lens, but you cannot scale down light photons. Those tiny cameras with their tiny sensors just cannot gather enough light for really good night sky photos. Not on their own anyway. They will likely gather less than 3% of the light from a similar setup that has a full frame sensor and full frame lens. Aperture numbers like f/1.8 or proportional only. An f/1.8 lens from a full frame camera has a physical aperture that has a 35x larger physical aperture than the one on a smartphone camera with the equivalent size of FoV (field of view). So that means the full frame camera can capture 35x more light than the smartphone camera when both have the same FoV and both have the same f number. Plus the full frame sensor has bigger pixels and more of them. Bottom line is this, the physics will highly limit the smartphone camera because yes, in this case, size does matter!

However, if you have a nice telescope with an eyepiece on it, which of course gathers huge amounts of light, and you place your smartphone camera right up to the telescopes eyepiece and let it focus on that image, then you can take some decent astro photos. They still won't compare to using a camera with a much bigger sensor, but they will look really good. We call that "digiscoping".

That’s all nice, but most people can’t afford a true Astro-photography rig (which would probably set them back $4,000 done properly). And most people don’t display their photos on a 65” 4K TV.

What you are missing is that the Apple Night mode stacks a series of photos, effectively reducing the sensor size disadvantage. Plus, this eliminates the issue with star trails with longer exposures.

I would wager that the photos I’ve seen taken of the night sky with an iPhone will reproduce nicely up to at least 5”x9”, which is all most people really want anyways.