![startrail telephone startrail telephone](https://i2.cdscdn.com/pdt2/3/8/9/1/300x300/sfr3701040401389/rw/ecran-vitre-tactile-sfr-startrail-4-outils.jpg)
For the latter, use NASA’s ‘Spot The Station’ service (opens in new tab) to find out times for your location. The longer you leave it, the better the final composite photo will look.Īlthough ’startrails’ is designed for one thing, it works equally as good for catching unpredictable meteors (which is handy if there are any meteor shower peaks predicted (opens in new tab)) as well as passing satellites and passes of the International Space Station. And again and again, overlaying each photo with the last until you get ‘star trails’ as the Earth rotates and the positions of the stars appear to change. When ‘star trails’ mode is activated your smartphone will measure the light conditions and adjust itself to take a decent night sky photo, then do it again. If you don’t have one, download the NightCap Pro (opens in new tab) app, which offers the same options and more. Go look in your smartphone camera’s options – perhaps under ‘more’ or ‘light painting’ – and you may find something called ‘star trails mode.’ It’s basically the ‘bulb’ mode from your camera.
#STARTRAIL TELEPHONE FOR ANDROID#
(Image credit: SkySafari for Android and iOS) Capturing star-trails, meteors and satellites "So when I'm processing those images on my computer later I can see a lot more shades, shadows and highlights and I can recover more of the dark or bright regions of the image than I would be able to from a compressed image," says Kerss. Raw images, often recorded as DNG files, have a lot more color information than JPEG files or compressed files. "One of the great things about a lot of flagship smartphones today is that they're marketed towards photographers and a part of that is making raw data available," says Kerss. If yours doesn’t, or you want finer control, there are many camera apps that offer just that, such as Camera+ 2 (opens in new tab) for Apple and Camera FV-5 (opens in new tab) for Android, which can also capture in raw for easier photos editing later.
#STARTRAIL TELEPHONE MANUAL#
Smartphones with ‘night mode’ also tend to offer manual settings where you can set the ISO and shutter speed. "You’ll get a nice sharp Milky Way at 30 seconds," says Kerss.
![startrail telephone startrail telephone](http://s6.s-sfr.fr/mobile/uc/00/68/60/23/STARTRAIL-III-white-large-front.png)
So what about in 'no light'?Īutomatically enabled when the smartphone detects a lack of light, ‘night mode’ is essentially the taking of long exposure photos. Enabled by bigger sensors that are more sensitive to light, flagship smartphones can now take excellent photographs in low-light conditions, such as twilight. So-called 'night mode' has been in fashion for smartphone cameras for the last few years.