My experiments with night photography

 After my studies of Star Finder! I make it a point to take out the book and my binos after dinner at the campsite to see if I can apply my gyan.

Alas, the clouds play tricks and as I gaze above at the sky, lying back on my granite picnic table, all I can see are various types of clouds- big, fat, squishy, fluffy, dark, pale- parading before me endlessly. 

I try to take pics of the night with my phone but end up with this:

I can't figure it out... Why isn't my camera able to capture what I can clearly see with my weak-ass eyes? I gloomily recall RK laying down some random fiat- Varsha, if we need to take a picture of the night sky and our phones won't cut it, we just have to figure out how to do so.. Maybe we buy a camera or borrow one, but it needs to be done.

*Sigh*

I don't particularly want to do either. 

So I Google "can Redmi phone take night sky pictures" and realise, apparently it can!

First- switch to Pro on your cell phone. This is the one with all the utterly inexplicable pictures (like tulips and clouds) and control panels. 

Then take a random picture with the default settings to see how it comes:

Then realise that maybe all those  people advising the use of a tripod are right.

Then stack the phone against the binos on the table, point the thing up and try again.

And when you change the WB (whatever that is) from the cloud to the two parallel lines, you get this:

Sweet!!

Then I play around with F moving it back and forth and getting pics like this:

Somewhere in the middle of the F control panel

And when I move F's control all the way to the lefthand-most side, I get:

F must be for Focus!

I'm seriously thrilled with myself. And while I'd been doing all this, the clouds have slowly cleared. I have maybe a 2m window before they cover things up again so I focus on the single star I find...

...Only to see more than 1 on the camera! 

At last! My camera is better than my eyes!

Do you know what this is??

It's the tail of the Big Dipper!!

And do you know how I'm absolutely sure of that?

A) I've seen the BD in around the same spot at around the same time before

B) the middle star (the one that's sort of jutting to the right a bit) isn't actually one single star- it's two! And when I see it through the binos, sure enough! Hello, Mizar and Alcor! I have a feeling that this characteristic, in addition to the general shape of course, is a definitive feature of the Big Dipper. 

All in all, I'm thrilled with my phone and, importantly, with myself 😛