I never imagined an old phone could take these kinds of pics!

Tl;dr = Just scroll down to look at the damn pics and zoom in. Pretty neat.

I recently, for the first time in YEARS due to lockdown restrictions, went on a trip - something i'll write about in a following post.

I have been on the occasional mini-trip, but these were not for the sake of travel or holidaying, but practical purposes and merely to other big concrete jungles.

No, this time I finally, finally, got into the mountains in the countryside, with the yaks, groundhogs, fresh air and dark skies.

Now, I'm not photographer, I just like pointing and shooting nice looking things which do the work of impressing people on their own without any intervention by me.

So it stands to reason I don't own a proper camera - Just my 4-year-old, cheap, Chinese phone. I also bought a $15 film camera from some guy but that's for another day.

When it came to our night in a hotel thousands of metres up a mountain - which was more like a space pod you can watch the river flowing and the stars above from the comfort of your own bed - we had an extremely memorable hour in the field trying to get the best pics of the stars.

The stars, you see, were AMAZING. Not quite what you might find in the Australian outback or higher up in the Himalayas, but pretty damn good considering I've seen a sky with maybe 3 stars tops for as long as I can remember.

With only my phone equipped, my girlfriend and I started attempting to download various apps to maximize exposure time or whatever (remember, i'm no photographer) and, though her iPhone 11 had no success, my old, rusty phone certainly did.

In fact, I dismissed the apps and found better results simply with the built in software. I set the maximum 30-second exposure, tried a few different ISO's, whatever they are, and then used two rocks we found from the field to precarious balance my phone at various angles on top of a wobbly fence post, or used the fence wiring to kind of clumsily clamp my phone in place.

The results blew me away! Obviously this is no James Webb, but it ain't far off! Check 'em out:

This last one actually was taken using an app, and as amazing it is, I actually prefer the above for how pure they look to the real thing. The one below is a RAW photo with something called cold and hot pixels, which I can't be bothered to look up, but it means a lot of the stars you see are something that should be removed as not part of the actual sky. They don't seem apparent in this copy photo, but on my phone it kinda ruins itYou can even see these pixels in the mountains so, yeah. Maybe if I knew how to process it but I'm happy with what I got!

The odd thing for me is, the sky I see here is completely unfamiliar to me. I was raised in a country with plenty of stars in the Northern Hemisphere, but only enough to have the famous constellations really clear and obvious. With the sky pretty much dominated by a blanket of stars, I fail to make out pretty much anything. If @lemouth or others can point anything out, would be pretty cool!

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Can't wait to show the rest of the trip! China as much as it is... diseased... by its leaders, has an incredible landscape one couldn't dream of back in Europe.