Welcome to the StarCast for the week of July 27th, 2025. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, with my co-host, Mike Lewinsky. --- ### Space Weather and Meteor Showers **Jay Shaffer:** Let's look at space weather. I saw in the social media headlines today that we have a big blob CME headed our way, so we're looking for possible aurora? Is that right, Mike? **Mike Lewinsky:** Yeah, hi, Jay. I think that big blob might be a little hyped. Spaceweather.com is calling it a minor CME that may produce a G1 class geomagnetic storm. That's forecast for today, July 27th. The official probability forecast for us in the mid-latitudes is 5% for the next 48 hours, a chance of an active condition, which is the lowest level of geomagnetic storm. We also see in the next day a 30% chance of a minor storm and just a 10% chance of a severe storm in the next day. Of course, at the higher latitudes, they're up to something like a 65% chance of a severe storm. The further north you are, the better your chance of seeing this so-called big blob CME. **Jay Shaffer:** Okay, let me tell you what else is happening this week, because Wednesday, on the 30th, we will see the peak of not one but two meteor showers in the same evening. The Southern Delta Aquarids will be visible toward the southern sky in the Northern Hemisphere. And the Alpha Capricornids will be toward the southeast in the Northern Hemisphere. The Aquarids usually show about 25 meteors per hour, and they're a pretty active meteor storm. And then the Capricornids usually show less activity but may have slower-moving and bigger fireballs. So we got a couple meteor showers to look for this week, and of course, August is kind of the active month for meteor showers, so we're going to look forward to some more meteor showers over the next couple weeks. --- ### Interstellar Visitor: 3i/Atlas **Jay Shaffer:** In space news, our interstellar visitor is still topping the headlines—that's 3i/Atlas. Is the interstellar object an alien probe? Mike has the story. Mike? **Mike Lewinsky:** Yeah, Jay, there's a lot of, again, hype in social media and in the news about a preprint paper by Harvard astronomer and astrophysicist, Avi Loeb. He gained some fame during a previous interstellar object, the comet Oumuamua, that showed up in 2017, and he suggested that a very long cigar-shaped asteroid might actually be an interstellar probe by alien civilization. He makes kind of some interesting points, and even in this new paper, they acknowledge that this is all very speculative. But there are nine points in the new paper, co-authored by Adam Hibbard and Adam Crowell. They suggest, for example, that the orbit of this new comet, 3i/Atlas, is unusually parallel; it's within 5 degrees of the ecliptic plane, and they calculate that the odds of that happening just randomly are around 0.2%. A lot of these points that they've developed are statistical. 3i/Atlas is going to approach three planets, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, at a relatively close distance. The cumulative chances of that happening is around 0.005%. But, as Avi Loeb and his co-authors argue, this is the kind of pattern you would expect to see if this was a probe conducting a planetary survey. Now, it's notable that 3i/Atlas is going to avoid Earth, and when it is closest to the Sun at perihelion, the object and Earth will be on opposite sides of the Sun. They speculate that if this is alien technology, this might be intentional to avoid Earth-based telescopes making detailed observations when it will be the brightest and most visible due to its proximity to the Sun. But the rest of it is just all pretty speculative. Those are the highlights, I think. Very low odds of it having the orbit that it has and making the passes that it has, and the rest of it just gets more speculative from there. So, I think it's interesting, it's worth mentioning. It is being overhyped. I've seen headlines like "The aliens are coming, we're about to be visited," and there's really not enough evidence to make such a headline claim. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, I was seeing that a couple of the things that they would say would qualify an alien probe would be that it might have some kind of radio wave activity—not radioactivity in the sense of radiation, but that it might have radio activity. Another thing that they would say that would be indicative of an alien probe would be that it would actually change orientation, in other words, so it might be like repositioning an antenna or something like that. And they haven't observed any of that kind of behavior. **Mike Lewinsky:** Yeah, and one of the speculations in the new paper is that there are two opportunities that this object will have if it had engines to perform an Oberth maneuver. This is the fastest object we have ever seen in our solar system. It is moving at something like 152,000 miles per hour. It could, if it had engines, fire those engines and stay in the solar system if it was, say, programmed to do a more extensive reconnaissance. Obviously, if we see something, if this thing doesn't leave on schedule, we can be much more excited about the possibility that we're being visited. And excited could be positive or negative, it depends on a lot. If I was going to design a probe to visit a solar system that I thought was inhabited, I wouldn't want it to be detected because it could be captured, and I would lose the opportunity to get that data, possibly. I think I would design it in such a way that you have the instruments, make the near pass to the sun, and collect the data. And then start transmission a year later when it's far, far away, and less likely to be noticed transmitting. And even if it is noticed transmitting, especially traveling at that speed, you're going to have some years to transmit your data before any Earth-bound ship could catch up to it to capture it, or if that was even possible. At that speed, I'm not sure that if we detected it a year from now, transmitting signals, I'm not sure we could catch it with our technology. So, radio transmissions would be a dead giveaway, and maybe the aliens aren't as worried about it. Maybe they have a high burst transmission, and they figure it's a one-shot; they transmit everything in a matter of hours, and then if we take their probe, oh well, it did its job. **Jay Shaffer:** Well, that's pretty interesting. I was trying to think about calculating what the percentage of light speed the object is moving at, but I'll have to save that for when we're offline. Of course, you would say that if they had a radio transmission, that would only move at the speed of light, so at the shortest time period, if it came from Proxima Centauri, the transmissions wouldn't reach their source for another 25 years of our time. **Mike Lewinsky:** Right. --- ### Beginner Astrophotography **Jay Shaffer:** So, let's go on to our topic for today, which is, how would a beginner get started with astrophotography? We'll talk about what equipment and techniques you need as a budding astrophotographer, somebody that is just getting started with the hobby or the pursuit, and what advice we can give them. Mike, what would your first advice be to somebody that wanted to get into astrophotography? **Mike Lewinsky:** We almost all have cell phones that are capable, if it's a modern cell phone, capable of taking long exposure photographs. The tool that you already have is sometimes the best tool to get started with. You can learn some of the basic points that are so important for getting good pictures, even if the camera underperforms relative to expectations. I would caution to have lower expectations of a cell phone camera than a dedicated DSLR. But those basics are, first of all, you absolutely have to have a way of keeping the camera as still as possible. So ideally, a **tripod**. They do make small clamps that will hold onto a cell phone. I've got several of them. They're very inexpensive. They just screw onto the top of the tripod head, and you clamp your phone in. With that, having the controls still functional, you can go into the advanced manual settings of the camera. Just about all modern cell phone camera apps have a **manual mode**. Then you can set an exposure time. For a dark night, I recommend starting out with as little moon as possible, starting out with a 15 to 30 second exposure. Don't be afraid to try different exposures and different values of the important settings. The important settings for astrophotography are going to be, of course, that **long exposure time**, probably not less than 15 seconds, maybe 10 seconds for a really good DSLR, or even 5 for certain DSLRs. For a cell phone camera, we're talking 15 seconds. Turn off **night mode**; it's not going to help you. You want to be in manual mode and set your exposure, maybe start at 30 seconds. Set **manual focus**. This is going to be probably the hardest part for the beginner, getting the stars focused. Your phone may have an Infinity focus point, at which point you can try that. I found variable results; not all infinity focuses are true infinity. So, start with the long distance focal points, and adjust up and down a little bit as you take photos. Setting **ISO** to probably 3200 is usually what we go for there. Use the higher resolution sensor if your camera has more than one. You want to figure out which one is the best and select that sensor/lens. I will also say the last point about this is that you probably want to enable either a **timer function** so that when you press the shutter, it waits for 5 or 10 seconds before it takes the photo. Or almost every phone has a voice-activated mode. I'll just relate a little story: when I was in Yellowstone last year, I was taking photos, and I had my DSLR on a tripod, and it was using an intervalometer to automatically take pictures, and I was making time lapses. But I wanted to take some manually, so I had my cell phone on its tripod, and I was using the voice-activated feature, and there were other people out there, this was after dark, other people out there just kind of watching the eruption of Old Faithful. And there I am, sitting on a bench with two cameras, and every 30 seconds, I'm saying the trigger word, which was "whiskey." Somebody who's walking along might have thought this was pretty strange. Here's this man who just periodically says, "whiskey," and he really needs a drink. **Jay Shaffer:** That's super funny, and I know that you are actually sober, so that makes it almost even funnier. Yeah, I wanted to comment on that a little bit, is that tripods are probably the most important piece of photographic equipment that you can buy, no matter what kind of photography you're doing. I always kind of joke that you cannot walk into any thrift store anywhere in America without seeing two or three tripods for sale for under $10. So, if you're short on money and you need to acquire a camera tripod, it's almost invariable that you'll find one in a thrift store. **Mike Lewinsky:** Yeah, and Jay, if I can just add on to that, I've got a carbon fiber tripod that's ultralight, it's perfect for backpacking or hiking, and it's my least favorite tripod. I almost never use it. I like the big, heavy, clunky, old steel ones, the heavier the better. Of course, you can weight down a tripod. I don't want it blowing over. I've had cameras damaged by being blown over. So, you can spend a lot on a carbon fiber tripod, but I think for a beginner, getting something that's really **solid** is probably very important. **Jay Shaffer:** That's definitely true. I have the same experience. I've got a carbon fiber, and it's got the rotating locks on the legs, and I've had those slip, so basically one leg goes down, and then it dumps your camera. So, I've also had some bad experiences with that type of tripod, and my cheapest tripod is the one that I use most often out there. Another thing, of course, is having a protective cover on your iPhone or your smartphone so that should it get dumped, it will bounce, and that's always good advice. A couple more things on smartphone astrophotography: there's actually a Facebook group I'm a member of called "Smartphone Astrophotography," and it's a great resource. They talk about the Samsung S22 being a very capable phone for doing astrophotography, the Google Pixel 9, and now the iPhone 15. They all have **Astro modes** specifically set for where you can use them to capture the Milky Way. They're basically tuned to do that, and they use stacking as well as long exposures. You can also go into, like you said, the manual mode and get some really great results. I'm actually seeing some pretty spectacular results of Milky Way astrophotography where you're actually seeing the color and the definition of the star clouds. There was one post in particular I saw yesterday, and it was a person that had tried to do astrophotography for the very first time using a Google Pixel 9. They were in an urban environment, probably bortle 7, and they did their exposure, and they said, "I am amazed. I can only see three stars with my naked eye in the night sky. And when I took the astrophotograph with the Google Pixel 9, I suddenly realized that the sky is full of stars." So you and I, who've been doing this for quite a while, we kind of take that for granted, and that experience we're used to experiencing lots of stars in the sky. To me, that was very enlightening to see the wonder of somebody that is just experiencing that for the very first time and being able to experience that through astrophotography. **Mike Lewinsky:** Yeah, it's such a great way to extend our experience of the night sky. I mean, I suppose I get a little spoiled sometimes when I look up, and it's like there's just not that many, and I'm in a very bortle 1 environment, as you are. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, and another thing, especially with smartphones, is that you can do something called **digiscoping**. Digiscoping is where you basically put your phone up to the eyepiece of a spotting scope or binoculars, or a telescope. You can get these screw-on or clip-on telephoto lenses for your smartphone. That will greatly increase your focal length and decrease your field of view. Those are particularly appropriate if you want to do moon photography with a smartphone. A lot of people will see the full moon and just use their smartphone and try to use the digital zoom in their smartphone, and they're not going to get really good results with photographing the moon. But if you can digiscope that with even an inexpensive pair of binoculars, or again, if you can get binoculars that mount on a tripod, and then you can get the digiscope mount, which mounts the phone to the binoculars, you can get some really incredible results. I mean, I've seen people doing deep space astrophotography where they're actually getting galaxies and nebula just using this digiscoping method. So, that's kind of some of the things that you can do with a smartphone. What about if you have a DSLR, or even a point-and-shoot type of camera? How would you get started in astrophotography with one of those types of cameras, Mike? **Mike Lewinsky:** Again, certainly having a **tripod** is absolutely essential. Having a **manual mode** is likewise really necessary. I did a little research right before our call here to look at what the kind of entry-level for astrophotography might be, and there seems to be a pretty good consensus that the **Canon EOS Rebel T7** is probably a good place to start. That runs $530, and I see that across the internet from Best Buy to BH Photo to Amazon, all running at that price point with an 18 to 55 millimeter lens, and that is an interchangeable lens camera. It's an APS-C sensor, so it's not a full frame, but that's plenty good to get started. So a tripod and a $530 Rebel T7 is probably sufficient to start doing astrophotography, wide field astrophotography. If you want to do deep space with a telescope, the beginner level is probably going to run into many thousands of dollars to buy a telescope, a good mount, and a digital camera. Probably $2,000 to $3,000 to start, whereas wide field astrophotography, which is really my favorite, you can get into it for, let's call it, $550 once you've bought that thrift store tripod. **Jay Shaffer:** Well, and of course, you can get an actually used camera as well. The T5, which is two versions back of the T7, is a camera that I've actually used in the past, so you could probably get those for under $500. That's a good way to get started with doing wide field. Again, let's talk about our settings a little bit: we probably want to have a lens that is a **28 millimeter equivalent or wider**. So, when we say a 28 millimeter equivalent, that means it would be a 28 millimeter lens on a full-frame camera. On an APS-C camera, that might be an 18mm lens. With those manual settings, you would go on your mode dial and you'd want to go to the **M setting, which is manual**. Generally, like you said, we'd want to probably start with an exposure between **15 and 30 seconds**. And an **iris at the widest that you can possibly get it** for whatever lens you might have. So if it's an F4 lens, for example, which most kit lenses are, that would be probably the widest that you could go with aperture. Then, on the camera, I always experiment a little bit with the ISO settings. I would start around **1600 to 3200 in ISO**, and see if that is too noisy for that exposure. If you're not experiencing noise, you can even push it further. Is that kind of the settings that you might use, Mike? **Mike Lewinsky:** It is, and I would add that **focus is just so important to check and recheck**. I've done time lapses and shot for hours, and I look at the preview image on the LCD panel, and it looks good, and I shoot, and then I get to the end of the night, and I discover that I never had focus. The trick there is that when you just look at the full image on the LCD, it is so small that out-of-focus stars will appear to be in focus. So you really have to use the **zoom function of the review** to look at one-to-one actual size and make sure that your stars are truly pinpoints and not fuzzy blobs. Because in the overview mode, fuzzy blobs are going to look like pinpoints. So, almost to the point of, if you're manually shooting, you're not doing a time lapse, you probably want to check that focus after every shot, just hitting the zoom button to view at the one-to-one, or every few shots. Especially with lenses that are not manual lenses, you put it into manual focus, and it's often very easy to inadvertently readjust your framing, and you've bumped the focus ring without noticing it. And now you're out of focus, and you're not going to see that in the auto review, unless you zoom in. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, and that's a great beginner tip. I think more advanced users might be going to a manual-type lens. On my manual lenses, I actually tape them down where my quote-unquote perfect infinity focus is. I actually tape that lens up so that it will always stay at that particular focus. That may change a little bit with temperature and stuff like that, but in general, that works as a trick for manual lenses. For automatic lenses, or autofocus lenses, even in manual mode, like you said, it's super easy to bump that. So it is, like you said, very important to double-check your focus. And then, I also kind of preset it even when it's light out, as I'll find the very furthest object that I can possibly focus on and basically at least get it in the ballpark as far as what Infinity Focus would be by adjusting that lens. **Mike Lewinsky:** Yeah, by the way, Jay, I did take a look on eBay just to see what that Rebel T5 is going for used. You can get a camera with a suitable lens in the $150 range. Some of the used body-only run as low as $115. So then you find a good wide lens for a manual lens. For your very first shoots, I usually find that I want to replace the kit lens with a fixed manual lens pretty quickly. So, to buy a body only for $115 and then probably another $50-$100 for a good F2.8, 18mm manual, used, that's probably $200, and you've got a really nice beginner setup. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, and you probably will have to add an **intervalometer** onto that, and those, of course, go for $20 to $30. I think the T5 does not have a built-in time-lapse mode if you want to do time-lapse photography. We could talk a little bit about intervalometers really quickly. An intervalometer is just basically it triggers your camera; it plugs into the camera and it triggers the camera to do an exposure every so often. On your camera, there's usually a manual setting called **bulb mode**. The bulb mode basically says that whenever the camera is triggered, it will stay open for as long as the trigger is open. The intervalometer works: if you set, for example, a 30-second exposure on your intervalometer, it will trigger the camera to open the shutter and hold that shutter open for that 30 seconds if the camera is in bulb mode. Then it will release the shutter 30 seconds after that 30 seconds, and then the camera will take an exposure. You actually use an external intervalometer even though your Sonys do have a built-in time-lapse mode, is that right? **Mike Lewinsky:** I have externals, but these days, just for the simplicity and the fewer things that can go wrong, I'm using the built-in. Now, I have bought a Miops (M-I-O-P-S) that is supposed to do bulb ramping, so I can get smooth sunrise-sunset transitions. I haven't quite gotten that nailed down, but I just picked that up a week ago. It's an interesting little device, $230. It does storm lapses, so it has a lightning detection mode, but you can put it into a time-lapse mode, and then it'll shoot at your interval. Plus, if it detects by infrared flash that there's going to be a lightning burst, it'll take extra pictures to capture the lightning so that you're only taking it every 4 seconds, you don't miss the lightning bolts that happen in between those 4 seconds. It's got some other features, so I've been playing around with that external device, and it just connects with a cable. It mounts in the flash hot shoe. But like I say, the battery on that can run out of exposures in the middle of my time lapse. That hasn't happened yet, but it's always one extra complication. I did not like the Sony Play Store time-lapse application, and I found an open source project that built their own, which is more flexible and has worked very well for me. I'm really happy with it. **Jay Shaffer:** And so, yeah, that's kind of getting a little bit out of the beginner category, but this hobby is addictive. Once you get your first good Milky Way photograph or a meteor photograph, it's hard to not become obsessed. **Mike Lewinsky:** That is how you're going to get your meteor photographs, and the odds of just going out and taking 20 pictures tonight and actually capturing a meteor are probably under 1%.Mike Lewinsky: Probably under a tenth of a percent. But if I go out and I set up my camera with an intervalometer, and I take photos from sunset to sunrise, if a meteor comes through the field of view, I'm almost certain to get it, because I'm going to take currently 10-second exposures with less than a second between exposures. In a minute, there's six exposures, and out of that 60 seconds, I am probably capturing 58 seconds of starlight total. So, almost every single meteor is going to appear in my time lapse, and then I've got the still photos that I can pull out and enjoy. Jay Shaffer: Yeah, that's true, and then, of course, the other nice thing about shooting time lapses is once you get them set up and you get the thing cranking, you can go to bed. So, you don't have to stay up all night doing astrophotography, which, when you get to be older, like me, you kind of have that 9 to 10 o'clock bedtime that puts a dent in your astrophotography, for sure. And yeah, I was out shooting a time lapse last night. I went out there this morning to recover the camera, and the way that my camera works to stop the time lapse is you actually switch the camera to off. I went to switch the camera to off, and the on and off lever on the camera broke off, so now my primary camera is basically inoperable, so I'm a little disappointed with that this morning. One last thing I wanted to mention really quickly, and we also mentioned this in our low-budget astrophotography segment a couple episodes ago, is that there are these new smart telescopes that are in the under $500 range, or the near $500 range, like the S30 telescope from CWO. That is a telescope that has a wide-angle lens as well as a telescope lens, and you can actually do time lapses, you can do long exposure astrophotography, and stuff like that. So, that's another thing if you just want to be really dedicated toward astrophotography; you can take a look at some of these new smart telescopes that are out there. Mike Lewinsky: Yeah, that's right, I really enjoy my Seestar S50, and it's great for not only nighttime astrophotography but for solar photography as well, using the included filter. Jay Shaffer: That's right, and you can. A lot of people think that astrophotography is a nighttime pursuit, but actually catching the sun and sunspots moving across the face, and things like that—I had the Venus transit a couple years ago that I captured with that telescope, and that was very gratifying. And of course, there's the solar eclipses that you can capture with that. So that's kind of how a beginner can get started with astrophotography, and we hope those tips have helped you out. We want to encourage you to be sure to comment, like, and subscribe, and let us know how we did, and what you'd like to hear more about or less about. You can also check out our individual websites at WildernessVagabonds.com, that's Mike's site, and mine is Skylapser.com, and I actually have a tutorial on that site for doing all-sky time lapses. So that might be helpful for you as well. And if you'd like to help us out, so we can fix our cameras, you can buy us a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/skylapser. The intro music is "Fanfare for Space" by Kevin MacLeod from the YouTube Audio Library. And from the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, this is Jay Schaefer wishing you all clear skies.