A starry night

It's been an intense weekend (well, like the other weekends I had). Wake up somewhere in the morning, start doing revision, tutor my friends on programming, do more revision, and it's time for dinner before I really realize anything. Quite a boring day I would say, just like most of the weekends. It's not like I go out to walk 6 kilometers every week anyways.

So it reached night before I really did any physical activities and my butt is shouting for compensation. It just feels uneasy to me to have my ass stuck to some flat surface for too long, and I have to go and walk a little or something to relief it. To be honest, I'm not sure if it's the legs are asking for more activities or the butt is complaining, but I just need to walk, so I did.

Walking around school at night is somehow strange. I mean, it's not that strange if you are walking around those Pokemon GO hotspots (we have a bridge and a little hut which were a Gym and a PokeStop so people gather there all day long), but I prefer to walk at somewhere with no one around. For example, I prefer to walk at...the furthest walkway from the students' dorm in which is the outdoor walkway at the furthest classroom block. It's so isolated that no one even goes there without reasons.

It was awesome walking in a place with only some ambient lighting and cool breezes, especially when you look up in the sky and see tiny little stars all above your head. Real stars, not those that appear because you are dizzy or something.

It's been quite a good while since I last saw a clear sky with all those stars around. I don't really know the limits of my smartphone camera, but of course it would be cool if I can really capture the stars or something. Since I'm already out here...let's go.

The Huawei Nova 2i had a Night Shot option in its camera app, so I'm just trying that one out. At first it caught nothing, but then I tweaked the ISO and the aperture things got a little bit more visible. And to my surprise, it catches more stars than my eyes do :D

Well...probably I set the ISO to somewhere too high so it contained quite a lot of noise in there. Compared to a night sky, it looks like a blackboard instead. I wonder where did the little lines at the lower left came from, but since I'm really close to an airport, they might be lights from airplanes or something like that.

A little fascinated by the phone's camera, I tried another mode. It's called Light Painting, in which you can use it to capture trails of lights. The idea is, since it can capture a trail of light, it should be possible for it to capture a little bit of light long enough for it to be bright and visible. Quite a funny idea, but by using this thing on a weak static light source like a night sky, it works really well.

Probably I can also get the same thing with Night Shot but with a lower ISO value...whatever.

Since Light Painting mode can be used to get trails of lights in the photo and it indeed has support for night skies, I decided to try it out for a moment. What to do when the stars aren't spinning around you fast enough? You spin your phone instead.

Well, it doesn't look as good as I thought. The main reason for that is I spin it by a little, then leave it for a few dozens of seconds, then move it by a little again, and somehow I moved it a little too much every time, hence the dots aren't even connected, but you can see it becomes a spiral-like thingy.

I tried it on another smoother surface and moved it by only a little every time, more slowly and carefully. Indeed, not a real trail, but at least better than what I got previously.

It's indeed pretty fun to play around with the phone camera and see how it would perform in the night sky - apparently I somehow underestimated it by a little before this.

A few tricks if you want to try it on your phone that has similar features:

1. Use a lower ISO. It's a bad idea to use such extended capturing mode (such as Night Shot) with a high ISO as it will really give a lot of noise. Consider a higher aperture instead.
2. Use a tripod. Because trust me, your hand shakes and everything you get will be...wobbly.
3. If you don't have a tripod or you want to use a flat surface instead, set your camera app to treat your volume button (or fingerprint sensor or power button or whatever your phone has) as an alternative shutter. The main reason for this is, you really won't want to move your phone from the moment right after you press the shutter until the capture ends, or you will get additional trails or lights or wobbly images. So with a setting like this, you can just put your phone on the surface first, then start capturing by pressing the volume key without the need of touching the screen.
4. It's good to experiment around, go play!

I'm not very sure if I can do the same thing with the Pro mode. Probably I will try to do so in another day, if I happen to have the mood and such beautiful weather on one day :>

Sigh, how much I hope to see the pretty night sky with no light pollution...it will be gorgeous. But it's already a good thing to be able to see real galactic stars in the city, right?

See you next time~
--Lilacse