This page contains photos me and my brother took of objects in space. The telescope used is a Sky-Watcher Classic 150p (150mm aperture) with a TS Optics 2x Barlow lens and a 10mm eyepiece. A Redmi Note 7 Pro is used as the camera using the Footej Camera app to control the exposure time of videos. For astronomy, where you can spend easily thousands on good telescopes and startrackers, this is a pretty affordable setup at below $300 and I am exploring what you can photograph with this.

The real ISS compared to the LEGO ISS

I was surprised how much detail you can see with a phone camera and a small Dobsonian telescope. We just set the phone camera to video (low exposure time is key for the fast and bright ISS) and then manually moved the telescope to follow the ISS. The left half of the image is the best frame we got that day. On the right is the LEGO set of the ISS for comparison.

The ISS flying by the moon

Using the extremly useful website transit-finder.com I found a time in the morning where the ISS would be passing in front of the moon. Since this was in the morning and the ISS was illuminated, the phone camera was not able to have enough contrast to see the ISS directly in front of the moon.

The moons of Jupiter

In the evening of October 23rd between 20:21 and 22:18 I took images of Jupiter and its moons roughly every 15 minutes. The resulting animation is shown above. The positions of the outer moons are not very accurate, since I had to readjust the telescope between each frame. But for the inner moons, you can see Io disappearing in Jupiter’s shadow and Europa appearing from behind Jupiter.