Stargazing

On 12 August 2024, we went for an astronomy talk on the disused airstrip at the ‎⁨Ladomirov⁩ observatory, Hornozemplínsky Región⁩, ⁨Slovakia⁩. As the talk was in Slovak, and my Slovak is almost non-existent, I had a lot of time to stare at the incredible sky, and eventually I decided I wanted to take a piece of it home.

So I took the first couple of these photos during the talk, and the rest once it had finished. I used the only camera I had, my phone (iPhone 13, not Pro - nothing fancy) pointed directly at the sky - no special lenses or filters, just a 10 second exposure in night mode and me trying very hard not to breathe or move!

Admittedly, if you zoom in to view them at 100%, they're as noisy as you would expect, but I think zoomed out they came out pretty well. Click on any image to toggle between original size and fitting it to your web browser.

The raw images were (of course) very dark, so I made some minor tweaks to brightness/exposure in the Apple Photos app (which also amplified the noise).

This page will load quite slowly, as each image is ~15MB and it's being served up by a docker container on a virtual machine on a mini PC that is also doing a bunch of other jobs - please be patient while it loads!

If anyone wants to use these for anything, they're free (no strings attached), as long as you include a credit. Please drop me a line at tom@bishlash.com if you're thining of making use of them.