DeepSkyCamera

Michael Seeboerger-Weichselbaum

About this app

This app is for astrophotography with your smartphone. You can take pictures with long exposure times like classical astrophotography with a DSLR or CCD/CMOS camera.
DeepSkyCamera takes pictures of the stars including a plan. You take the pictures in RAW format. Android uses the format DNG which can be processed with the well-known stacking software.

Astrophotography is not a 1 click solution and you should familiar with astronomy and astrophotography. The app is for astronomers who know what is a RAW file, what is stacking software and how to postprocess an image. The app is NOT a 1 click solution for pretty pictures without any work. This app helps astronomers and astrophotographers to take the images. You need knowledge about astrophotography and for some images you need a telescope.

The phone must support RAW mode and must support manual settings. The app checks the support of RAW and manual settings during startup. Most of the cheaper phones doesn't support RAW and manual settings (like Samsung A and J, Huawei P10 lite). High end phones (Samsung S, Huawei P9, P10 and P20, LG G4 to G7) support RAW.

You can take light, flats, bias and dark frames. Its very similar to take pictures with a classical DSLR oder CCD/CMOS camera. After that you can do the post-processing with other stacking software as well as with other software for image processing.

App can focus automatically to infinity, hyperfocal and of course manual focus.

The maximum ISO depends on the camera sensor. Most sensors limiting the ISO value to 800. You can type in a higher value but the sensor wil set it to maximum ISO level of the sensor. LG G supports ISO until 6400, Google Pixel until 12800.

Its the same for the exposure time. Most of the sensors limiting the maximum exposure time to 30 seconds. You can type in a higher value but the sensor sets it to the highest possible value. Die LG G and Huawei P supports up to 30 seconds.


DeepSkyCamera takes only pictures. The app is not designed for the post-processing.

The sample picture shows constellation Ursa Major with the LG G4: 256 light frames each 30 sec which results in nearly 2 h exposure time in total. 170 dark framesan 100 flat frames applied. Processed with additional software. The second and third pic shows Cygnus taken with LG G4 and LG G6. The last pic shows M31 with LG G6 (M33 is on the bottom, double star cluster and Cassiopeia upper left).

You can use a simple portable mount for travel purposes like iOptron SkyTracker, AstroTrac or StarAdventurer. You put a ballhead on the top and add a clip from a small phone tripod. With the preview function (which is automatically visible after start) you can adjust the ballhead according to the brightest stars.

A manual is here:
https://www.deepskycamera.de/manual/DeepSkyCamera_manual_en.pdf

Ratings and reviews

Update: Thanks to the dev for the reply. correcting my review. I took several photos. Took some amazing photos of the night sky, best Android app I've found so far for repeating long exposure photos. The only downside is that the RAW files can't be opened in Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. The dev is aware and is working on this. Also, I didn't see a way to buy the Pro version to support the dev.

[[DEVELOPER, HELP ME!]] Hello! I'm excited to be using this app, and was recording the moon rising! but... when I checked my images... all of them were black. my camera could most certainly see and display the moon, but the images outputted had nothing on them. I tried turning on the lights in my room and letting it take a photo- but alas, it was still all black. What do I do?? I'm on the most recent version of Android.

I can say this is relatively good for a budget phone I'm using (Samsung Galaxy A12) since I can take pictures of the moon and the Orion constellation better than the pro mode of my camera. But I have issues like when I am taking pictures of Jupiter, there is a hole in the center of the planet, making it look like a doughnut. I don't know if this is because of my camera or this app but I can conclude that this is a great app for people who are starting out in astrophotography.

What’s new

Support for Samsung S26 Ultra, S26 Plus (both with a maximum exposure time of 45 seconds) and S26 (30 seconds)
Full support for Motorola Signature
Vivo Y35 with 32 sec max exposure time instead of 10 sec
Nokia X30 5G with 20 sec exposure time instead of 1/5 sec
Shiftphone 8 with 2 sec max exposure time