Photographing the night sky has long been reserved for professional photographers and hobbyists with a big enough wallet to dish out for expensive photography equipment. But technology has balanced the playing field to a certain extent, and with the camera features Samsung has packed into its Galaxy Phone lineup over the past few generations, the capacity to capture beautiful pictures of the night sky can cost significantly less and fit right into your pocket.
With the Galaxy S21 Ultra, Samsung debuted a beta of its Expert RAW app, which unlocked the ability to shoot RAW files that can be professionally edited without losing detail. By the time the Galaxy S22 arrived on the scene, Expert RAW also included what Samsung calls “Astrophoto”. This camera mode opens up a world of photographic opportunities after dark, making it possible to take and edit pictures of the stars, Moon, planets, constellations, and Milky Way with the pocketable camera system of a Samsung Galaxy phone.
All about Astrophoto
Traditional astrophotography can be quite a process, especially if you want to capture less common phenomena taking place in the sky. A high-end DSLR or mirrorless camera is typically part of the required hardware, as is a sturdy tripod to mount it on. A sharp lens and a remote shutter release round out the hardware, but there’s a lot of know-how that comes with a setup like this. You’ll need to know about ISO settings, aperture settings, and shutter speeds, as well as how to properly focus the lens on distant objects.
These nuances can take years to master, but Astrophoto is able to do most of the work for you. Whatever object you may hope to take a picture of, the feature uses artificial intelligence to pluck it out of the night sky and then determines the optimal camera settings for capturing it. A “Sky Guide” option is even available to point out constellations. But rather than having to manually estimate the proper exposure based on years of experience, Astrophoto’s machine learning algorithms will handle most of the adjustments.
In order for this process to work, your phone needs to take dozens of pictures of the scene. Astrophoto manages this process, determining the proper amount of images to take and the proper span of time to take them over. Once it completes this process, Astrophoto will process those RAW files, enhance them to look their best, and stack them into one single image you can share across social media or potentially hang on your wall.
How to take a picture with Astrophoto
Before diving into mobile astrophotography, you’ll need to be sure your Samsung phone supports the Astrophoto feature. While Samsung has made the Expert RAW photo app compatible all the way back to the Galaxy S20 lineup, Astrophoto is only compatible back to the Galaxy S22 lineup. That puts the Galaxy S22, S23, S24, and S25 phone generations in play, and you’ll find Astrophoto on recent Samsung Galaxy Z Fold and Galaxy Z Flip phones as well.
Taking a picture with Astrophoto requires first installing the free Expert RAW app, which you can download from the Galaxy Store. Once installed, open the app and navigate to its settings. Here you’ll need to ensure the images you take are set to 12MP resolution. When higher resolutions are selected, Astrophoto won’t be available. The constellation icon is where you want to turn next, as tapping this icon opens up the options for Astrophoto mode. Once here, it’s simply a matter of choosing your exposure duration and pressing the phone’s shutter button to capture an image of the night sky.
This is a process that will take several minutes, so, unfortunately, Astrophoto won’t entirely eliminate the need for additional equipment. You’ll need a tripod in order to get sharp, blur-free results, as the phone has to be perfectly still for the duration of the picture-taking process. Additionally, you can use a Samsung S Pen to trigger the shutter button and ensure the removal of potential phone jitters entirely. Plus, some photo editing skills can help you get more creative with the image once it’s taken, which you can do directly in your Samsung phone’s Gallery app.