Astro Image Capture with a mobile phone

Mobile phone cameras are increasingly improving. My Samsung S21 Ultra is able to capture a picture of the moon with reasonable clarity. Older versions – my Samsung S8 required an extra piece of kit – The Celestron mobile phone adapter, shown below:

This adapter is excellent for capturing images through a telescope or binoculars. As a start to capturing images through my Maksutov 5” reflector, this was my route to photographing the moon, the comet Neowise, the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn Christmas 2020 and my first deep sky object, the Orion Nebula. After capturing these, that was it and dedicated astro cameras were the next stage!

So if you have a pair of 10×50 binoculars with a tripod or a small telescope get one of these adapters as a starter and get those first astro images!