Wow, was 2024 a banner year for sky-watching or what? We had an eclipse of the sun, a comet, and northern lights. And I caught them all with my collection of incredibly cheap, junky cameras!
First, there was the solar eclipse in April. Check out these photos, taken with a $10 smart phone I bought at a grocery store a decade ago. It may be a cheap, cheap camera, but it recorded the partial phase of the eclipse, complete with sunspots, as seen through a telescope with a basic solar filter. All I did was hold the phone up to the eyepiece. The screenshot from Stellarium is for comparison.
What is more, the cheap camera recorded the time of these photos with precision. I therefore know that the two photos above were taken just 24 seconds apart. I can see that the moon progressed noticeably across the disk of the sun in those 24 seconds; in the first photo, the edge of the moon has not reached the dark center of the large pair of sunspots, whereas in the second photo (which is slightly less clear) it has.
Then there were the northern lights in October. Louisville, Kentucky, where I live, is pretty far south for these. In the past I have made night-time runs from my city home west into the darker rural skies of southern Indiana to see supposed displays, only to be pretty disappointed. I want to see northern lights with my eyes, not some display that only looks good on a high-end phone! So when Marc Weinberg, a meteorologist on the local station WDRB-41 (who is really gung-ho about everything in science that is more than 10 feet above the ground) was going nuts about the display during the 10 PM news on October 10, I harummphed. But, I got off my chair and wandered out onto the front porch.
And there, as I stood on my porch in the center of the city, looking northward across downtown (really bad light pollution), I saw the northern lights. They were easy to see. So I ran in, hollered to my wife to come see, and grabbed my cheap-o tripod that I got at a discount store, and my decade-old Nikon Coolpix camera, and went back on the porch to take some photos.
I would set the camera for a 2-second timer shot. I could push the button and let go. The camera would count to 2 and take the photo. Thus I would not be shaking the camera when the photo was taken.
I had to use the column of my porch to block out a streetlight! Yet I was able to capture the northern lights. And, since the Coolpix is relatively primitive, what I captured actually looks pretty much like what the eye saw.
Of course, if the northern lights were so impressive from the middle of the city, wouldn’t they look great under the dark skies of southern Indiana? So my wife and I hopped in the car and drove out, and saw… nothing. Someone turned out the northern lights. I took the images below from my front porch when we returned. Note the difference!
Five days later we were out again, standing in a vacant lot near our house, with the tripod and the Coolpix, looking across an abandoned factory for Comet A3. My godchildren and their family (who all live around the corner) were there, too. Again, under really bad skies we could all see the comet. The Coolpix caught it, too. You can just see it in the image below. The right-hand image I processed a bit using the “picture tools: corrections” feature in Microsoft WORD. (You weren’t thinking I would have proper image processing software, were you?)
The Coolpix has a 10x optical zoom, and here is a more “zoomed” image, with a “WORD-processed” version also.
Again, if the comet looked good from the middle of the city, how about from under the darker skies of southern Indiana? Back in the car again the next night. But even though we drove deep into the middle of farmland, with few lights around, the comet was not any more impressive. Maybe it just lost that much brightness in a day. The Coolpix failed, too, as you can see in the images below.
The big surprise was, however, my free Nokia 139DL flip phone! (My phone company gave it to us because they forced us to stop using our old 3G flip phone—the Nokia is 4G.) It captured the image below. How about that? I don’t think the comet looked quite that good to the naked eye.
Why use such poor equipment? For one, I like doing it—I like being sort of the cheapskate anti-Fr.-James-Kurzynski. But more importantly, I hear whining from the astronomical community that the people you see in astronomy club events or even on our VO Full Moon Meet-Ups tend heavily to be gray of hair and pale of complexion. Sky & Telescope magazine had an editorial about this a while back. Well, the non-gray/non-pale crowd tends to be less likely to be able to afford fancy equipment. If someone with less money picks up Sky & Telescope and only sees ads for high-priced stuff, or articles with people using high-priced stuff, that person is probably going to say, “not for me”.
But you do not need high-priced stuff to do astronomy. I am doing it with the junkiest, cheapest equipment around. Everyone has better equipment than me, in their pocket! So you can do it, too.
Yeah, you too!
