- This image presents the Milky Way. Specifically the center of our galaxy seen from our perspective

   After years taking photos on a fixed tripod with my cell phone, I believe I've reached the limit that a cell phone can offer in terms of astrophotography. From the beginning, when I still didn't get good results, I knew that I had a lot to extract from the potential of modern cell phone sensors. Even hearing from renowned people in astrophotography that it would not be possible to improve the image quality, I decided to keep striving to try to extract as much as I could. Before taking photos with a fixed tripod, and now with an equatorial mount, which helped even more to reach the limit or close to the limit.

     My last picture of the milky way with more than an hour of exposure was taken 3 years ago with my old cell phone (Xiaomi Mi9T), which unfortunately was recently stolen. But with that I ended up buying the new Xiaomi 12 with the new sony sensor (Imx766). It is a sensor very similar to those used in planetary cameras (1/56 size). But with higher resolution. Which works out to 2 microns of pixelsize. An acceptable pixelsize for good light gathering in astrophotography considering most cell phones have 1 micron pixelize or less.


    To take this photo, I got together with my friends at a well-known astrophotography meeting point here in Brazil (Munhoz, Mg). As it had been 3 years since I had taken a photo of the Via lactea, I decided to dedicate an entire night to photographing only with my cell phone without the aid of telescopes. Well then I used my motorized equatorial mount to help; putting the cell phone stuck in a common support + a dovitail with 1/4 screw. As the equivalent focal length is short (About 24mm), I ended up not needing to use guide to get 60s without a trail.




📋Exif

Date: 21July 2023

Location: Munhoz, Brazil. Bortle 4~ sky with 14% Moon.

Camera: Xiaomi 12

Mount: Generic eq3 mount with onstep.

Exposure: 250 raw photos of 55 seconds at 400 iso. F1.8 lens

Processing details: Image Stacked and 99% processed in the Pixinsight program. Using common tools like Dynamic background extractor, Photometric spectometric color calibration, hyperbolic strech, starnet, blurxterminator and noisexterminator.


Single shot:



With StarnetV2