I didn’t manage to photograph any meteors last night, but the sky was amazing. No moon and very dry air with no wind to speak of all combined for a special night. The Perseids are thinning out rapidly.
After fighting my iPhone 6s plus to work with the app NightCap Camera for months I made a small breakthrough. One of the capture modes called “Long Exposure” didn’t work well with my old 6 plus, but with the higher megapixel count in this phone it just pops. With my old phone this setting just returned muddied smudges, and artifacts grew with the length of exposure and ISO settings. I was able to crank the ISO and shoot 5 minute tracked shots with much better results. I wish I had ran the same tests ahead of comet Neowise. I might have actually got a decent shot instead of the grainy mess with which I was left.

- Jupiter, Saturn and the Milky Way
- 80F44F7A-39DF-4CDB-B472-2B7B0C79C2D5.jpeg (250 KiB) Viewed 818 times
In the lower left the two bright “stars” are Saturn (leftmost) and Jupiter, with a faint smudge of the Milky Way. While the noise and artifacts are pretty bad in this shot it is a vast improvement over my efforts to catch Neowise. Still, working around the limitations Apple put into the camera control firmware in the 6s is a royal bitch.
Hopefully I’ll be back out under the stars pretty quickly after the knives come out, and if this surgery doesn’t break the bank a shiny new DSLR with find a home at my house, along with that iOptron CEM25P goto equatorial mount. I’m sick of trying to pull off cell phone miracles.
RS
“Sleeping in the hen house doesn’t make you a chicken”.