During a few precious hours of clear skies on the evening of the 24th February 2026, I tested a newly acquired tri-adapter mobile phone holder the society has purchased for use with outreach events and for members viewing nights. The unit can accommodate larger eyepieces, so is perfect for attaching to the society's SmartEye unit and some of our bigger conventional eyepieces.The ability to be able to move the position of the phone in depth as well as length and breadth, makes aligning the phone's camera on an eyepiece a breeze and using either delayed shutter release or the included Bluetooth remote control it was easy to take motion free images.This will allow members and the public to attach their phones to various scopes to take good quality snapshots of things they may have seen through our various scopes.
The SmartEye was subsequently used to take images of M42 and the Alnitak region of the night sky, by hooking it up to a Sky Watcher Esprit 80 scope driven by a guided tracking mount, with the SmartEye's internal capture card used to store data. Due to the bright moonlight and light polluted location, both narrowband L-eNhance filter and an L-Pro light pollution filter were used for taking various short exposure images for different data sets.
As well as shooting with the SmartEye I also tried out a newly acquired G class Sony 18-105mm lens on my Sony ZV-E10 vlogging camera to appraise its wide field and zoom capabilities. The camera was mounted on a fixed tripod with both single and burst mode images taken at various focal lengths; imaging the moon and the Orion area of sky. The widest setting allows for an area of sky some 40 x 70 degrees which will come in handy for tracked Milky Way photography on future moonless nights, whilst medium to full telephoto settings will be useful for comet and medium-wide field targets. I shall look forward to using this new lens on future imaging nights.
Click on an image to get a closer view
Tri-adapter for smartphone snapshots
Chris Bowden
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