The new iPhone 16 is out and I hear that the cameras on it (as well as the iPhone 15) are spectacular, even doing a very good job with simple astrophotography.
I have an iPhone 13 and it does not have those features, but I don’t have any other reason to spend $1,000+ on an upgrade right now. Maybe next year with the iPhone 17.
But what is my old phone capable of? Especially here in the LA suburbs with enough light polllution so that only the brightest stars are visible anyway?
Well, you can see stars! It’s not that different than what you see with the naked eye in all of this light pollution, at least in terms of how many and what the limiting magnitude is. Blow the image up full sized and there’s a ton of noise in the image, but we’re probably seeing stars at least a magnitude fainter than what the naked eye can see, which is better than I expected. This view is looking from the zenith all the way down to the west.
This is more looking straight up. The tree at the “top” is to the east, but straight overhead you can see Deneb and the “northern cross” constellation, Cygnus. The brightest star near the bottom is Vega in the constellation Lyra.
Like so. Somewhere up around the edge of the tree branches should be the Andromeda Galaxy, but while this old iPhone camera might grab it in a dark sky, with all of this coastal haze and light, I think that’s a no-go.
The key to getting good pictures with this uber simple setup is to keep the phone extremely steady, so I just put it on the ground. The good news while I was down on the patio taking the pictures I didn’t encounter Coco (the neighbor’s dog), any curious rabbits, raccoons, or The Long Suffering Wife wondering if I got down on the ground in an involuntary fashion. I got down and then back up all by myself with no damage, thank you very much!
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 