Hi everyone and welcome back to AstroBloak my name is Glen. Today is a follow up video and I'm going to put a link at the top of the screen of a first video that I did in this series which is how to start astrophotography just using the camera on your phone. In that video I show an app that I use which helps with astrophotography with my phone. Many phones do have night time abilities and the latest phones even have astrophotography settings. But older phones do not and even though you may have one of the latest phones some of the apps can be really powerful. There are many apps however this is not the only one so I have a look through the Apple Store or the Play Store and you will see many types of app like this that will help you. Today's video is going to just be an overview of nightcap so I hope it helps and if you do have any questions please leave them in the comments section below. So I'm just going to open the nightcap app and obviously it's just going to be a blank screen at the moment. One of the first things I'd like to show you is there's a gear button at the top of the screen here which is settings and within there you can actually press tutorials. That will take you to the nightcap camera website where there's actually tutorials and instructions on how to use everything within the app and it's very useful. There's tutorials, tips and questions all sorts so it's well worth going to that to look things up. Within the settings there are the settings here we can delay how long the camera sits before it starts taking an image, we can set up timelapse pictures with delays and how long the exposures are, there's many settings there. But what I wanted to mainly focus on today are the simple settings that are in the phone that you can use and you don't need to obviously be overly knowledgeable on anything to do with astrophotography. This will help you along the way. I have discussed that using a tripod is the best way with one of these phones but it's not 100% necessary. If we press the star down the bottom here we can see that we have a few features and the bottom four are all dedicated to astrophotography. If we press the stars mode it actually says what to do. So place your phone in a tripod or a stable position as I say I've seen people put their phone in a shoe, I've seen people just pop it up against the wall, you can do all sorts. The nice thing about a tripod is it does help you aim the phone a lot easier. Once you've done that you press the shutter button and wait 15 seconds and the camera will automatically set everything for you and take a picture of the stars. And here's an example of the kind of picture you can get. The next mode in here is called Star Trails mode. Now as the Earth rotates it actually gives the illusion that the stars are moving across the sky. They actually stay still, it's us that are turning. If you point the camera up into the sky and use this mode for at least 15 minutes you'll actually pick up the movement of the stars pointing the phone or the camera towards the Polaris which is the Nulvin star you'll get a nice circle of stars in the sky. You can see from my picture unfortunately I seem to have done it at a time where a lot of satellites and planes were passing by. So they've all photobed on my attempt here to show you a Star Trails picture. One of the things I want to say is it's very important that you keep your phone as still as possible when doing any form of astrophotography. Long exposures are required to gather the light needed to get the stars. So if the phone moves in any way you'll blur your picture. We've also got a Meteor mode here which if you point the camera into the sky and there are if you go online or there will be apps that will tell you whether there's a Meteor shower due. You point the camera into the area and just press play and that's this button here at the bottom. And what the camera will do is take a picture every five seconds. If it's got a Meteor or shooting star in it it will keep that picture. If it hasn't it will delete it. So you can let it run for an hour or two and then you can come back and see what you've got and pretty sure you'll get a shooting star or two. Quite a good feature. Some people like to photograph the International Space Station known as the ISS and again you can look up when this is due to pass over and what part of the sky it will be in. This is saying you start the photo process before the ISS due to pass. So you put it in the right area, press the start button and start it off and then once the ISS is finished passing over you can then press the shutter button again and it will stop. And that can give you a nice result. I've not taken any pictures with that or the Meteor mode yet but I'm sure they will give good results as the other two features I've used and they've been really good. So a couple of little things on the screen here you've got a zoom feature so if you want to bring the camera in closer to something you can that might be for something like the moon. If you want to manually control what the pictures are going to be like with the camera you can actually swipe the screen. Now on the right hand side you've got how long the exposure is so you can bring that all the way down or you can push it up and you can get that to be a nice balance. Now when taking pictures of the moon you will need to use this you'll need to bring the exposure time down. The moon will initially be an extremely bright light on the screen and you won't get any detail so you will need to bring that down. Another thing that can help is the ISO. This is the sensitivity of the camera and this app allows your ISO to go down all the way to 32 but again you can balance it with the exposure until you see the moon looking quite good. At the top we've got a white balance so what that does is as you move it up and down you'll see the sort of colour of the white areas change so you can make them more blue or more red. And at the bottom we've got the focus. When it's pushed all the way to the right at 100 that means that the camera is set to infinity. You will want that for the moon or for the stars. But if you want to do some other type of night time photography you might want to bring the focus down. So this camera or this app should I say isn't just for extra photography it also does night time photography and there's lots of things that you can do with that. So you could do time lapses or long exposure photography of say cars moving in a city and you'll get all the streaking lights. There's actually a feature for that called light trails and long exposure and if you go into the tutorials for the nightcap app it tells you about the features that they do and how you can use that further. If you do have any specific questions please leave them in the comment section below I'll be more than happy to try and answer them for you. The app is very good it does help you take better pictures and but as I say it's not the only app that's out there so do look around. But I hope that this has helped you in some way and all I can say is get out there and get some pictures of the stars because it's very rewarding. So until next time I would really like to wish you all clear skies.