Wesley's Tool-Box

If you look towards the south around 9 to 10 PM in summer, Milky Way can be seen flowing down to the horizon... if you're lucky enough to be in a place with a dark sky. As someone living in a city, I have to rely on a camera's long exposure to catch a glimpse of it, like what I've done 9 years ago. Still, I wondered if iPhone's Night Mode can replicate this magic even after a decade of urbanization that took place here. As it turns out, the answer is a resounding "yes". A bit of post processing needed to be done to bring out the details, but the same can be said for the earlier photo as well.

All I had to do for the capture is to wait for a clear night sky, move to the edge of the city with fewer lights, set the phone on a tripod, and do a 30-second Night Mode exposure. Fortunately, the Liberation Day weekend provided the right atmospheric conditions, and the southern part of the city is still just full of rice fields after all these years. I was worried a bit about iPhone's finicky focus under low light, but it didn't cause a trouble this time.

In the end, I was able to take more than twenty consecutive photos of the Milky Way. Due to the ambient glow in the sky, the original photos still came out looking a bit washed out. But adjusting some settings like contrast and black point in Pixelmator Pro fixed that issue. If you want to see all the photos I took this day, take a look at this video.

Device: iPhone 16 Pro
Settings: 24mm equiv. - ISO 1250 - 30s - f/1.78
Time: 2025-08-15 22:08 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
Processed with Pixelmator Pro 3.7

What if you don't have a tripod handy? Well, you can do the Night Mode photography with bare hands and still capture the Milky Way, as you can see here. As a matter of fact, my first attempts were done this way. When I realized that a reasonably good quality can be had despite the relatively short (10 seconds) exposure and high ISO, I brought out the tripod later on. It's amazing what smartphones can do these days.

Device: iPhone 16 Pro
Settings: 24mm equiv. - ISO 2000 - 10s - f/1.78
Time: 2025-08-15 20:56 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
Processed with Pixelmator Pro 3.7

2024 has been a complicated year, especially towards the end. I hope the year 2025 will be able to resolve a lot of loose ends and make fresh starts. Here's a photo of the sunrise that I took from my home in Naju to calm you over. Happy new year, everyone!

If you want to see the sunrise as it happened in real-time, here's a video I uploaded.

Device: iPhone 16 Pro
Settings: 120 mm equiv. - ISO 40 - 1/3195s - f/2.8
Time: 2025-01-01 07:56 KST
Location: Naju, Korea

After observing the ISS last year, I was waiting for some interesting changes on board the space station. And this came in the form of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft docking on June 6 as a part of the Crew Flight Test. This test was originally planned to last about a week, but thruster issues kept preventing its return to Earth. This meant that when I finally got the opportunity to make an observation in Daejeon after the monsoon season was over, I could photograph it with the ISS.

Weather in August was still unstable, and forecast for August 15 was cloudy with a chance of rain in many places. But outlook for Daejeon was clear, so drove my car there to make an attempt. And as forecasted, I could see the Sun onobstructed and was able to make a satisfactory observation, as you can see in the composite photo above. The docked Starliner is easily visible as a bump on the left-hand side of the space station's main modules. You can also see the large sunspot named AR3784 near the center of the Sun.

For those who are not familiar with the space station's structure, here's an enlarged photo showing where the Boeing Starliner is currently located within the space station. It's docked to the IDA-2 at Harmony module's forward port. SpaceX Dragon spacecrafts have docked at this location before, so some of my previous observations show that at the same spot instead.

Device: Nikon P1000
Settings: 3000mm - ISO 125 - 1/2000s - f/8
Filters: ICE N100000 (Neutral Density 16.5 Stop)
Time: 2024-08-15 14:20 KST
Location: Daejeon, Korea
17 photos processed with Pixelmator 3.6.6, RegiStax 6.1.0.8, and PIPP 2.5.9