A Tripod for Smartphone Astrophotography

By

 As an amateur astronomer, Astrophotography mode is one reason why I got a Pixel 4 XL.

But there’s another essential piece of gear for taking long-exposure photos of star fields or astronomical phenomena, a tripod. The one I bought for the Pixel 4 XL is a Phinistec photo tripod.

Phinistec tripod with some accessories: carrying pouch, phone adapter, Bluetooth shutter
My Phinistec tripod with some accessories: a carrying pouch, a phone adapter, and a Bluetooth shutter.

I do all my astrophotography from an apartment building in Milan, Italy, where I live. It’s a light-polluted urban area, but these days I can’t wander around much.

I observe the sky from the apartment’s small balconies, which have the area of a medium-sized carpet. This constrains the camera holding gear I can use. I wanted a full-height tripod that can extend to at least waist level, not a tabletop tripod, as I can’t use tables or other elevated surfaces to set the photo equipment on.

The Phinistec tripod can extend to a height of 125 cm. It’s cheap, compact, and very light. It comes with a smartphone adapter, a Bluetooth remote shutter, and a handy carrying pouch. There’s also a Gopro adapter I don’t need.

Although the product specs mention compatibility only with iOS, the Bluetooth shutter works fine with Android. To pair it with your phone, turn on Bluetooth discovery on the device, power up the shutter, and follow the prompts on Android.

The tripod is perfect for Astrophotography mode with the Pixel 4 XL. I can quickly set up the tripod and bring it to a balcony. There’s a minor inconvenience, though. Even at full height, when pointing at high angular altitude areas of the sky, viewing the phone’s screen is not much practical. I have to uncomfortably crouch or bend behind the screen.

I hope to take advantage of the tripod’s compactness and bring it to areas with darker skies to take better shots.

Popular posts from this blog

Using a Bluetooth Keyboard on Android

By
Image
Two years ago I bought a cheap Bluetooth keyboard from Amazon.it. At €14, it was mostly an impulse buy for exploring mobile typing on the go and in similar settings , such as workstations with reduced desk space. My FREALL 7INKEYBD-BK Bluetooth keyboard. I initially used the keyboard with the Android tablet and smartphone I had, a 7” Lenovo Tab E7 and a Pixel 2 XL. I later repurposed the keyboard for the devices I replaced those with, a Lenovo Tab M8 HD 8” tablet and a Pixel 4 XL smartphone. Despite the simplicity of operation, it took me some trial and error to figure out how to pair the keyboard with an Android device and what keystrokes insert the characters I need, such as accented letters when writing in Italian. Moreover, I realized I never blogged about my experience with the unit. So I’m posting these notes in case you come across the same or similar keyboards. The keyboard The keyboard is a cheap, compact, plastic chiclet unit that comes with a small foldable stand for a ta
Read more

Lenovo Tab M8 HD Review

By
Image
I bought a Lenovo Tab M8 HD , an 8” Android tablet. It comes with a MediaTek Helio A22 SoC, an IPS panel, 2 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of storage. I ordered the device from Lenovo’s Italian online store for €134. In this post I’ll share my early impressions on the device. The packaging box of the Lenovo Tab M8 HD tablet. Motivation The Lenovo Tab M8 HD replaces the Lenovo Tab E7 7” tablet I bought almost a year and a half earlier. After enjoying the Google Nexus 7 2012 and 2013 tablets I left Android slates for several years. My return to tablets with the November 2019 purchase of the cheap Lenovo Tab E7 was a sort of impulse buy. I wanted an affordable Android slate small enough to be compact but with a large enough screen to help productivity . I also figured it would double as an ebook reading device and let me explore the Android ecosystem. The Tab E7 was nice but limited. The screen didn’t have good touch sensitivity, performance was poor, there was a lot of lag, and the screen was no
Read more

How to Add Code Syntax Highlighting to Blogger

By
Image
On my blog I always wanted to format source code in Python and a couple more languages, but couldn’t find a convenient way. Until I read a tutorial on adding syntax highlighting to Blogger blogs like mine. The Blogger post composer actually provides the monospace Courier font that may be used for source code, but it works well only for inline text . If I apply the Courier font to a block of code, the composer renders each line as a separate paragraph. This leaves too much vertical space that makes the code look ugly. A workaround is to switch to the HTML view in the composer and wrap the block within <pre> ... </pre> tags, which insert the correct line spacing. However, the code doesn’t stand out on the page and there’s room for improving its scannability and visual impact. Fortunately, Blogger is an old dog I can teach new tricks to, like the setup the tutorial I found presents. A Python code snippet with syntax highlighting rendered by highlights.js in a post of the Moo
Read more