star trails are a wonderful way to get started with astrophotography and you don't need any
fancy equipment to start in this video we're just going to be capturing and processing a star Trails
photo directly on your Android smartphone the only things that you'll actually need to follow along
with this video are your Android phone and some kind of tripod or other way to keep the phone very
steady for a long time while we're taking pictures of the stars and what I'm using in this video is a
little smartphone clamp like a 10 clamp on just a normal tripod but I've also had great success with
a 12 generic smartphone tripod that I got off of Amazon and that's it for physical items just your
Android phone and a tripod with a clamp for your phone and that's it before we head out under the
stars though we need a few different apps so let's go through the apps one by one the first app is
stellarium mobile it is free and what it does is it puts a planetarium right on your phone so we'll
use it to find the celestial poll and I'll explain what that means a little bit later in the video
the second app is intervalometer for time lapse it's by the developer mobile Photon and this app
costs 199 at the time of recording but it's worth it I think what I like about it is that it seems
to work with any Android phone in conjunction with your native camera app the third app is star
Trails by the developer slash it's free with ads or you can unlock the ad free experience for 199.
and the fourth and final app is Snapseed this app is free and it's my favorite app personally
for editing astrophotography on a phone with it we can control things like curves contrast saturation
and this is going to allow us to put our final touches to our own taste on our star Trails photo
okay so with all these apps downloaded the next step is to actually get outside on a clear night
preferably a moonless night I wasn't lucky with the weather so I'm actually recording this on a
clear night with a full moon and that just means that um the sky in the end result I'll show you
here will be a little bit more blue and it'll be a little harder to bring out the star colors so
if you can do this on the new moon your result will be better your result will also be better
the darker your sky is so if you know of a park where you can escape the city lights it is worth
driving and I think it's also more enjoyable to be out under the stars in a dark spot
I'm now going to show you every step for how to capture the star trails and I'm filming this first
part during the day so you can clearly see what I'm doing but of course when you really do this
you're going to have to do it at night so you can see the stars the first step is you're going to
open stellarium mobile the app and when you hold it up and move their phone around you can see what
stars are visible in whatever Direction your phone is pointed it uses the phone's compass and GPS
and for your first star Trails project I suggest we point at the celestial pole uh all the stars
will appear to move around this point in the sky because it's the axis of rotation for our Earth
and that is what star trails are they're the Visual Evidence of the rotation of the Earth
so to find the celestial pole in the northern hemisphere it's quite easy
what you can do is you can just click the search option and type in Polaris
and it will lead you to Polaris in the sky it's at the end of the Little Dipper if you can see
the Little Dipper where you are in the southern hemisphere there is no bright star close by the
pole but you do have a constellation that is close called octans so you can type in octans
and it will point you in the right direction uh now we need to set up the Android phone
so that it's pointing at the celestial pole and will stay put while it's taking pictures
and so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to eyeball Polaris here and get it clamped in
to the tripod and then just make sure it's nice and steady and then we're ready to go
next I want to show you that on certain phones like mine here this is a Huawei P30 Pro phone and
I've also heard other than Huawei this also works on honor phones you can simply go to more in the
native camera app than light painting and finally star trails and with this mode all you have to do
is click on the Stars to focus then click the record button once to start and after an hour
or so you tap it again to stop and you have a star Trails image and I'm not sure exactly which phones
have this mode I know Huawei and honor but I'm not sure if any other funds have it but if you
do have it in your camera app it is super easy but if you don't have this if you looked in your
camera app it's not there no worries because next I'm going to show you a universal method
that's going to work on all Android phones using the apps that we downloaded earlier let me tell
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okay so the universal method for capturing star trails with an Android phone requires
this app called intervalometer for time lapse it costs 199 and when you first open the app
you need to do a little setup with giving it permissions because it uh will control your
camera app but this setup is only required the first time you open it so it's not that big a
deal the way it works is it'll should prompt you to visit accessibility settings you scroll down
until you find intervalometer click on that flip the switch and say okay I'm giving this
app control then when you go back to the app you may get this message the first time I found the
easiest way to get rid of this message and never see it again is just to restart your phone after
restarting the app should work fine and here is how it works you open in the app you pick
the camera you want to use it with I have a few options for cameras on this phone but you may
just have the stock camera app that's fine then click open intervalometer and camera and it should
open your camera app with this intervalometer window on top which gives you additional options
I'll first walk through the options here in the intervalometer window
for timer it should suggest the default three seconds and that's fine that just means when
you start it will wait three seconds before actually starting to take pictures and that's
nice because then your first photo won't have any camera shake from you tapping your phone screen
for both the number of images and the interval I suggest leaving these blank and when you do that
when you just delete anything that's there you should see the number one in parentheses like this
and if you set it up this way it will just take photos continuously until you stop it which is
exactly what we want for Star trails this little Target button allows you to make sure that the
intervalometer app knows where the shutter button is in your camera app in all the combinations I
tried it figured this out on its own so you likely won't have to really mess with this
and the only other button to note is this one you'll Press Start infinity symbol to start
taking pictures for your star trails and then press stop when you're finished after an hour
or two in your camera app if you have a pro mode you can set the exposure time to at least two
seconds but longer is fine too if you have an option to go longer if you do much longer than
like five seconds you might have to play around with the ISO so the pictures don't get too bright
if you don't have a pro mode look for a night mode or a fireworks mode anything that you think
is going to take a longer photo than normal is what you want and with that done I have found on
Modern smartphones you can then just tap the sky once to focus if you see a bright star it's it
helps to tap on the bright star and it should be able to find focus and and lock Focus down
that way some phones also have a manual focus option that can be helpful if you can find it
once you're in Focus you usually won't be able to see much on screen except for a little pinpoint
of light where the brightest stars are okay and then with that all set up you just tap the start
Infinity button here and leave it alone for as long as you can wait and you don't want to uh
bump it you also don't want to get any stray light you just sort of want to leave it alone
and like I said earlier I think about an hour is a good minimum to aim for when taking star trails
after that time has passed you can just press the stop button and it will prompt you with this
little ad to download some of their apps but you can just uh tap away from that pop-up because
we're not going to be using those apps and now you're going to have hundreds of individual star
photos on your phone and what we're going to do next is stack those with the star trails app I
have the free version so I'm going to go into processing options and watch an ad to unlock
the premium features with that done I'm going to switch to PNG for the save mode which will be the
highest quality and leave the blend mode set to normal then we're going to go to this pick images
button and for this you can tap and hold and then swipe your finger over several images at once this
takes a little practice but once you get it it's pretty easy and it's going to take some time to
select all the images that we want I'm going to stop here at 800 uh because I think that's enough
for this demo and then when we've selected all the images we want we just tap done at the top right
you might get served another ad while it's stacking in the free version but it's easy enough
to x out of that and it will start stacking all of these images into our final star Trails image
and it's fun to watch as it Stacks uh them because it's uh it Stacks them live showing
you the progress as the trails get longer and longer when it's done stacking it will save
the photo to your phone in the star Trails folder and we have one more step in this tutorial which
is to now edit this star Trails photo to taste whatever you want it to look like with Snapseed
so open Snapseed tap the big plus button in the middle to open our image and it should be right
there in recent images and the adjustment I like using best in Snapseed is tune image
the way tune image works is tap and hold and if you move your finger up and down on the screen
you can access different adjustments and then once you've picked an adjustment if you move
your finger left and right you can adjust that live and it will show you what you're doing right
there with a preview on the image so what I'm trying to do is add some contrast and make the
image a little less blue dominated which again is because I shot this with the full moon out
when you're happy with your adjustments you can just click the check mark in the lower right and
then you can save a copy of what you've made here the edited version so here is my final
edit I think even with the Moonlight it looks pretty cool the Moonlight actually sort of lit
up the trees a little bit and it has a nice wintry look to it I hope you feel ready now
to go out and shoot some star Trails yourself with your Android phone let me know how it goes in the
comments this has been Nico Carver from the nebula photos YouTube channel till next time clear skies