hey everyone nico carver here nebulaphotos.com this is another installment of five minute
fridays where every friday i just do a short video on something that's on my mind and this
week i'm going to do a rundown of three apps that are useful i think for astrophotographers
so let's just go ahead and jump in all of these are available i think on android and ios i'm gonna
start with photo pills which is a ten dollar app i think it's well worth that it has some just handy
features you can look at the what the sun is doing every day and know like for instance when does
night time start so 10 30. that's useful i mean and you can actually make this a widget um and so
i've done that i can just show that real quick here just like that so i can i can see exactly
when astronomical twilight ends at 10 30. it also says when the galactic center is visible so
right now it's it's uh mid-summer so the galactic center is visible right uh at the
beginning of night time and it also tells me right down here um how much night time with
no moon so 4 hours and 34 minutes tonight pretty good if it only weren't so cloudy um
okay other than that other than just that i mean that alone just making it so easy making a making
it widgetable uh i think i'd pay 10 for that but it has way more than that and of course has really
great planning features and i'm not going to be able to show in a five minute video but the one
that i do want to just mention really quickly here because i use it so much is the spot stars
this has a camera database and you can also put in any lens focal length and then it can tell you
uh the 500 rule versus the npf rule and not only that it has the the super strict npf rule and
also the less strict one and so what i do is if it's a single exposure kind of thing like like a
single exposure milky way or aurora i use the the default npf rule which is telling me 13 seconds
with a 14 millimeter lens and a canon 60d if i'm planning to stack like stack 100 or 200 pictures
then i use that accurate npf roll and again this is for untracked astrophotography which
is something that i'm i'm really into and have a bunch of videos about okay this is
quick i realized but we're just going to go ahead and move right along here
to sky safari and sky safari is my favorite planetarium app it comes in different flavors
depending on how much you want to pay i've paid for the most expensive one called the pro version
uh for me it's worth it you can look at sort of the feature list and decide what's worth it to you
i will say that uh you might want to wait for a sale because they often have really good sales
on the on the sky safari apps like around the holidays i think they go for up to like 40 or 50
off okay so how do i use this this already knows my location because it pulls it down
from the gps on my phone and so then i can just say okay i know night time starts at 10
30 because that's what uh photopills told me and now i can look at anything here in cygnus and
cepheus which is where i'm planning to shoot and so i can see with my rokinon 135 and my canon 60d
that's how the elephant trunk is set up that's because i've set those in my equipment database
but i have a bunch more in here as well so if i wanted to see instead what the elephant trunk
looks like with my stellar view telescope and my qhy 268 i just turn that on hit back and it's been
added right there to uh the screen and i can add as many of these field of view indicators
as i want which is really handy for planning i can quickly zoom in here just by doing a pinch motion
and see oh yeah so the whole elephant trunk part of it uh fits in my field but i don't get the full
emission nebula there the last one may be a little bit uh weird because it's not a planning tool it's
actually an editing tool and the reason i want to show this one is because i've been getting more
and more into doing astrophotography just with my phone so like milky way shooting with my phone and
the natural conclusion to that is why if i can shoot astrophotography with my phone why not
also try editing it on the phone and so snapseed is my favorite so far this one you just open up
a picture so this is a picture straight from my phone of the milky way this is a 30 second
exposure i took with a barn door tracker and then to edit it right here on the phone i
could just click tools and tune image and then if you sort of swipe up and down you can pick
different options here so i'm going to pick the shadows and bring those way down i'm going to pick
contrast and bring that up a little bit and i'll pick saturation and bring that up too but when i
brought up saturation since uh you know this is a normal color filter array so there's a lot of
green noise it really brought up a lot of green in the picture so then what i can do is i can go into
back into tools here go to curves and just like in photoshop which i've shown many times
we have the the normal luminance or rgb curve here but if i click right there i can pick my green
curve and just bring that down just a little bit and just like that i've edited a picture of the
milky way right here on snapseed on my phone i can export it save a copy share that to instagram so
this is something i really want to get more into is you know fully smartphone astrophotography
because i think it's going to be a really big deal in the next few years hope this was a handy
five minute friday for you until next time again this is nico carver nebula photos.com clear skies