It was a balmy warm evening on Sunday, December 28, in Louisville Kentucky (USA). The Moon was riding high in the sky over my back deck, with clouds scuttling in front of it. It was such a nice evening, in fact, that I decided to grab my kludged-together telescope rig and have a look at the Moon. And then I decided I would use my Cheap-O $20 smart phone to try to get some video of the Moon in the clouds.
If you are not familiar with these Affordable Astrophotography posts of mine (click here for all of them), my goal is to show what can be done with the cheapest of equipment. We have folks here at Sacred Space Astronomy who do good astrophotography. I do cheap astrophotography. There are lots of people with interest in the sky who do not have lots of money, so cheap is important, too.
Now, it was more than just a balmy evening on the 28th of December, 2025. That day the temperature set a new record high of 75° Fahrenheit (~24°C). That shattered the previous record of 71°F (~22°C), set only in 2021. So it was ridiculously warm and pleasant. Furthermore, those scuttling clouds were running ahead of a cold front that would drop the temperature by 50°F (28°C) in 12 hours! I would video the Moon in shirtsleeves. Sunrise the next morning would see the temperatures in the mid-20s F (-7°C)!
The video below I obtained by just pointing the phone up at the Moon on its default video setting, and recording. It is sufficient to show the clouds going by rapidly.
This next one is from my first effort to shoot video through the telescope. I have trimmed off all the bad parts where I couldn’t get the Moon centered, and whatnot. I think it shows the view of the Moon pretty well, and you can see some clouds going past.
The video below is from my second effort. In making this video I held the phone camera at a different angle relative to the eyepiece, so the Moon is facing a different direction. There are heavier clouds going by the Moon, and this gives the camera some trouble. Again, I have trimmed off all the bad parts.
This is from my third and final effort of that evening. I did not trim off as much this time, so you can see me having to align the camera with the eyepiece, and, at the end, moving the camera away from the eyepiece.
If you try this sort of thing yourself, be warned that it takes some practice. I get the camera aligned pretty rapidly in the last video — much more rapidly, and with much less fumbling around, than I did in the previous two videos. That is why I trimmed that material out of them. Have patience and keep at it, and eventually you will discover how to shoot the Moon with your phone camera.
The circumstances of these videos were truly remarkable, since December 28, 2025 saw a record high temperature that shattered a recently-set record high temperature. It is truly abnormal to be able to use a telescope in shirtsleeves in late December in Kentucky. This would seem to be a striking example of a changing climate.
However, while that may be true, the picture is complex. Being a true nerd, I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of my home utility bills for 25 years. Our utility, Louisville Gas & Electric, provides average temperature information on each monthly bill, so I have the LG&E-reported average temperature for each month since March 2000.
According to the LG&E figures, the average temperature in Louisville has been declining for over a decade. As you can see from the graph below, for the period of March 2013-March 2025, the drop is 0.0003365°F/day, or 0.123°F/year, or 1.23°F/decade, or 1.47°F for that 2013-2025 period. So it isn’t like one can expect warm days in December in Louisville now.
What we are getting is wild events like what happened on the 28th, when the temperatures skyrocketed (thanks to a couple days of strong steady southerly winds), making for a great opportunity to shoot the Moon (cheaply) in pleasant conditions and with dramatic clouds — and then those temperatures plunged.
