Astrophotography Adventure (cont'd) - next attempt

After a rather disappointing first attempt at imaging the Moon and Jupiter with my Starblast 4.5 inch and an iPhone, it's time to give it another try.  The pictures from the first try were definitely overexposed and also seemingly out of focus, although it was tough to tell because of the overexposure. This time I used the Low Boost on the ISO on NightCap Pro and I upped the magnification to around 140X (7.5mm eyepiece with 2X Barlow).  I decided to just try photos of the moon with this configuration and my hope was that the higher magnification would help make it easier to achieve focus as the lunar craters would be an easy focus point.  And I have to say I am pretty pleased with the results:


Still a bit out of focus, but so much better than the first overexposed images. The crater Tycho is in the lower middle of the photo and you can kind of make out the rays system that extends from it. Other than being cropped, there was no post-processing for this image.  I'm sure some work in GIMP could improve it quite a bit.

 

This one is even better, showing Copernicus with its rays in the lower middle left and the Jura Mountains in a semicircle in the upper left edge.

 





 

I'm pretty pleased with these, considering this is just the second attempt with the iPhone.  The Low Boost increased the low range of ISO and easily eliminated the overexposure problem.  Then it was just adjusting the exposure time to see what kind of picture you got.  There is still an issue with the focus and I'm not quite sure why that is. Both of these images are simply photos - I haven't even begun to play with video and Registax. And neither have them have been post-processed in any way.  I'm pretty sure that post-processing could improve both these pictures greatly.

 

Obviously, excluding the Sun, the Moon is probably the easiest photographic target. The next easiest is probably Jupiter. So next time I will try again with Jupiter using what I've learned here. That's just the way astrophotography goes...