Hi this is graham from jenham's astro in this video we're going to see if we
can take a picture of the orion nebula messier 42 using a smartphone an adapter
and a pair of budget binoculars now in the past i've made a video about this smartphone
adapter and another one that's a bit more up-market and i've shown that they can
be used to connect a smartphone over the eyepiece of a telescope but in this video we're going to
go down budget somewhat and we're going to see if we can connect similar arrangement a phone
adapter onto a pair of binoculars and if we can get anything decent look at the night sky
so you've got a smartphone you've got a pair of binoculars lying around the house what else
you're going to need to have a go taking a picture of the orion nebula well a couple of
the things you're going to need an adapter so this is one that i picked up online for around
15 pounds it was branded by the go sky brand but there are lots of very similar looking adapters
and they're basically a tray and a clamp and then you can play around with the tray to adjust
the position of the camera or the eyepiece will come to that the other thing you might need one of
the other things is you're going to need to have a way of holding the binoculars stable so you're
going to need a tripod which normally means that you're going to need to have a bracket that will
attach the binoculars onto the tripod so here's one here it's like an l bracket
pretty cheap easy to get hold of and there's a standard size of fitting uh on binoculars and the
other thing we're going to need is going to be an extra app on our phone so even though we know that
the camera on board standard modern smartphones is very good for astro we're going to need to be
able to take control of some of the settings that are normally automated by the camera app so i'm
going to use an app called procam8 but there are other apps around i've used one called nightcap
and there are definitely several options you can take with this but i'll just concentrate on
on using the one for the purpose of this video so you need a phone an app an adapter your binoculars
and something to hold the whole thing steady in the form of a tripod
okay so there are a couple of key skills you can have to master if we're going to make this work
the first one is attaching the camera rigidly to the back of the binoculars now on this but
not this pair of binoculars these are 10 by 50s but all binoculars have got the two eyepieces
basically the same distance apart on these uh this particular model has got rubber eye caps
so you can see here that normally there is a rubber eye cap around the eyepiece to make
it more comfortable when you hold it against your eye i want to set this up so that i have
the minimum distance between the camera phone and the back of the eyepiece that's because
the image is going to be at the best place when the camera is relatively close to the back of the
eyepiece so the first thing i want to do is roll back this rubber eye cap which straight away gives
me a couple extra millimeters i can get that much closer to to the back of the the eyepiece
on the binoculars and then secondly i'm going to figure out how to attach this adapter now these
are devilishly fiddly things i have to say you can do amazing things for only a few pounds but
i'm not going to come on here and tell you that they're easy to use they are fiddly and you're
going to have to practice but as with a lot of things with astro best thing is to practice
during the day set up during the day make all your mistakes when it's light get all your
focusing working etc etc and only go outside when you're confident that your setup is just right so
basically i've discovered by playing around during the day with this setup that i can get a nice
solid clamp like that hopefully you can see and if i put this orientation of adapter
then the camera itself when it sits here in the rack it is then adjustable around the back of the
eyepiece which we'll come to but the other thing is when it is there this eyepiece is also free
and obscured and i can use it to actually find the object that i'm going to be looking for and trying
to photograph so for me with this particular set of binoculars this is the kind of orientation that
is going to work and as you can see i've by taking the removing the rubber eye cap rolling it back
we're going to have a very little distance between where the camera is and the back of the binoculars
okay after all it seems like days but it's probably only been 10 or 15 minutes i think
i've got everything lined up so now i'm looking out of the window and i've managed to get
the camera lined up with the back of this binocular eyepiece lens so after doing that
which is basically a process of moving the camera up and down and then left to right and then after
you've got it in the right place filling the field of view of the camera with the image then
tighten everything down because the idea is we're going to better carry this whole setup outside and
start taking photos and if you need to readjust something at night like the alignment between the
back of the camera and the binocular eyepiece it's incredibly difficult because you haven't got any
bright sort of reference like you have here like a tree or something like that so basically set
it up during the day clamp it all down and that's really the only way this is going to work just to
see one more thing if we turn around and look um if i lift up the camera now hopefully you can see
that there is actually very little gap between the camera and the eyepiece lens it's only maybe two
or three millimeters and that's what we need in order to be able to fill the frame of the camera
which is the intention so that is the setup that's just using the normal in this case iphone
camera app but now we're going to switch over to look at the app that we need to take astra photos
okay so as i mentioned the normal camera app that you have on a phone a smartphone isn't really up
to the job of taking exposures at night time for of astronomical targets so basically i've swapped
over to one called pro cam 8. it's just one of many options but the main thing is it allows you
to control more of the settings of the camera than you can using the standard app which is really
aimed at automating the settings on the camera so if you imagine this is a bit like going from a
point and click to a digital slr in terms of being able to control the settings so looking on the
on the app one of the most important ones is here it's telling me that i can set the format of the
photo so i can set it to be in uh tiff format or the standard format but more importantly here
i can set it to to record in raw so this is a format in which none of the data is lost we can
then manipulate that after we've taken many frames and we can manipulate that in a computer to take
the best overall image of the target so it is a raw camera output that we're going to be recording
and down here we've got a series of controls the most important ones are here we can control
the exposure so if i set the exposure it's currently 1 800th of a second at night time
for what we're going to try and do we're going to go to the other extreme we're going to go
up all the way up to a full one second exposure now we're not tracking the rotation of the earth
here so with a one second exposure i hope that with this amount of magnification 10 by 50 that we
don't see any trailing of the stars but that can be a problem with long exposures but this is one
second is as far as we're going to go and i think it's going to be okay and the other setting that's
important here is the iso so that is the speed setting so again the app is allowing me to control
that and actually in this case i can set 3000 iso so basically the camera is at its most
sensitive always amplifying the signal as the highest amount that it can and it's going to be
opening the shutter for a whole second which is the longest period that you can control it to
to do that for so obviously that is aimed at grabbing as much light as we can even though
it's only one second's worth of target and then we can see what we can do in a computer
afterwards if we uh if we have a look at the output so that's it you need an app like this
figure out during the day just like setting up don't try and work out what all the all the
buttons do at night for the first time because really you get it'd be frustrating and you'll
probably give up so allow yourself a couple of hours to familiarize yourself with attaching the
the camera and the adapter say my recommendation is that you try to do it so you can still point
the binocular using the remaining lens and then get everything set up practice during the day
check download the picture onto your computer check that it is coming out in this raw format
it will be a much larger file in this case each image is something like 10 10 megabytes so check
that that's all working before you go out and do your actual session of capturing the astro target
okay so let's just figure out where we're going to be looking basically orion is currently in
the south we zoom in a bit using stellarium we can see this is constellation of orion
so we've got a very famous orion's belt and what we're interested in is here so this is
urine nebula
so that is basically where we're looking due south very bright should be very obvious
okay so we're looking at the camera now we're set up on the orion nebula and we're going to take
one second exposures just over iso 3000 using the timer
here we go hopefully i can just leave this running go inside and have a cup of tea
but of course the earth is still turning so realistically it's going to track across
the field of the binoculars fairly quickly so i'll go inside for a couple of minutes
so the hard work is done last night took 120 frames of the orion nebula each of them one
second long and now we're going to do today is try and combine them into a single image
so what i've done is i've put them all onto my laptop and i'm going to use a program called
deep sky stacker and it's busy crunching away here and basically what it's going to do is it's going
to take 120 frames it's going to try and line up the stars in orion one after another and then it's
going to put them on top of each other offsetting where necessary if there's any difference in the
stars between framed framed frame and of course there will be because looking through the back
of the binoculars the constellation the orion was slowly drifting through the frame as we
were taking those pictures even though only it was all done within five minutes so i'm going to use
deep sky stacker to take 120 frames i'm going to take the best 80 and get one single output frame
and that's going to be the equivalent of taking a single photo for about one and a half minutes and
after that that output file can just go into any photo editing software and we can manipulate it a
bit we can play with the brightness we can try and enhance it play with the color and see what we get
so here's the final image so yeah i'm pretty happy with that it basically works we've seen that you
can take some simple binoculars a smartphone you've probably already got spend a few pounds on
an adapter and make it all come together i'd say though word warning this is not the easiest way
to take an astrophoto it is quite frustrating to use one of these adapters and at night it's going
to take a bit of practice to find the object even something as bright as the orion nebula is going
to be a bit frustrating a bit fiddly and you're going to have to try a few times but if you accept
that and you don't um send me a comment telling telling me i said it was easy because it isn't
if you accept all that and it may be a little bit of a challenge then it's definitely a way
of producing a deep sky photo without spending too much money i'm certainly going to have a go
at taking more photos of other bright deep sky objects using this setup so i hope it's
been useful if you like this video then please subscribe to genomes astro and thanks for watching
you