OV9

Quoted for the new page;

Mito Man wrote: Sat Mar 29, 2025 11:04 am

Nice

Went about two and half hours drive out of the city last weekend. Absolutely freezing but lovely clear midwinter skies. One of the best views of the Milky Way and Great Emu I've ever had. Fortunately there was a tripod handy so setup my Pixel 9 Pro up and it went into an automatic astrophotography mode.


Imgur link so may need VPN

Results are very pretty and it's incredibly impressive that the phone would do up to a 4min exposure without streaking, lots and lots of image processing going on. But after fiddling with settings it wouldn't produce an image anything like what I was seeing which was a little disappointing.
Although the glow of the milky way much much brighter than to the naked eye the contrast difference to the Southern Cross, Pointers and other bright stars is completely washed out. The cross is very distorted but that's just the ultrawide lens being fishy.

Just searching for a semi-relevant thread (?) to post this - don’t forget the non-total eclipse this evening. If you do forget - you might find yourself accidentally going to bed early….

Edit: not this evening - Wednesday. Duh.

I look forward to being able to see the eclipse on my solar generation app.

Do you reckon a welders mask would be protection enough ??

If you use it to cause a shadow like you might a tea strainer, yes.

dinny_g wrote: Tue Aug 11, 2026 1:34 pm Do you reckon a welders mask would be protection enough ??

Back in the late 90’s (when we had a total eclipse in the Deep South - about 90% up in Scotland, a huge number of the people where I worked headed out to the car park to watch it.

I’d grabbed 2 pairs of polarised sunglasses out of my car so I could view it safely - I was showing people how wear one pair, and look through a lens of the other whilst you rotated it so the polarisation was in the other axis.

Christ they like to bitch and moan about this on the news, I just looked at the sun and can see it fine, and can still see fine

Cloudy here. All I know is it’s dimmer than usual…

Not a cloud in the sky here. Except where the fucking sun is

jamcg wrote: Wed Aug 12, 2026 7:15 pm Not a cloud in the sky here. Except where the fucking sun is

It’s refracted onto the wheel of the X5 here in Spain -

Combination of UV sunnies and a good ND filter set to maximum allowed for quick glances.

Very cool to see.

Really Weird light over the house at the max point

My telescope made a right hash of that, it struggled to track the sun - I presume the AI hasn’t had much training on solar eclipses. Then it kept losing focus and messing up the exposure.

Yeah, that was cool. Lovely clear evening where I am. We all had those cardboard glasses and watched it out over the fields with a beer in hand (well the daughter had Ribena instead).

Would love to see a total one where you can take the glasses off and see the corona properly.

I looked away while pointing my phone at the sun and got quite a good lens flare:

I had my welding mask on but then couldn't see my phone to take a photo