I found a trick to shoot the moon without a telescope using just my phone and a pair of binoculars

I tried holding my phone up to some old binoculars I found at a thrift store in Denver, and it actually gave me a decent shot of the craters. Now I'm wondering if anyone else has jerry-rigged a setup like this for astro photos?

2 comments

2 Comments

kim.hannah2d ago

Oh my god I did this exact thing last summer with a pair of Nikon binoculars from 1987 that my grandpa left me. I duct taped my iPhone 11 to the eyepiece like a total cavewoman and somehow got a picture of the Tycho crater that looked like a fuzzy golf ball. My friends laughed at me but honestly for zero dollars spent it felt like a huge win. The lighting has to be super specific though, I had to wait until like 2am when the moon was directly overhead or else everything just looked like a blurry cheese wheel. I bet if you mess around with the exposure settings on your phone you could get something way sharper than what I managed. This is the kind of budget space photography that makes me feel like a genius for five minutes before I realize I'm just a person holding trash together lol.

michaelcoleman1d ago

I was out in Moab about two years ago with this beat-up pair of Tasco binoculars I scored for 5 bucks at a garage sale, and I taped my old Samsung Galaxy to them with electrical tape from the auto shop. It took me like 15 tries to get the phone lens lined up right over the eyepiece, but once I found the sweet spot, I got this wild shot of the Aristarchus crater that looked like someone dropped a glowing rock on the moon. The trick for me was turning down the ISO to like 100 and using a three-second timer so my shaky hands didn't ruin it. I know we're out here looking like we're building a bomb with all this tape and jerry-rigged gear, but the feeling when you actually pull off a decent shot is just the best.