A man takes incredible photos of space - using his phone and an £80 Aldi telescope. Physics teacher Stephen McAllister has revealed his tips and tricks for space photography - including budget kit.
Stephen McAllister, from Port Glasgow, began his journey into astrophotography after picking up an £80 telescope from Aldi. Stephen, who has a scientific background and a long-standing love of astronomy, found the budget gear during a supermarket trip.
He says despite the low cost he is stunned by the results. Stephen began photographing the planets from his back garden using his telescope linked to his phone.
"When I was fairly young, a lot of interesting things were happening – it was around the time of the launch of the first space shuttle," said Stephen. I spent a lot of time outdoors in my teens, and I spent a lot of time fishing and out on my bike after dark. I’d stop and just look at the night sky and appreciate it – you can’t help but admire it.
"I think that’s what started me on my journey to being an astrophotographer. Experiences like that led me to get my first space telescope in my twenties.
"Around that time, we had the most fantastic Leonid shower in the 90s – I’ve not seen anything like that since. They were really quite inspiring things.
"Then fast forward and it’s the COVID lockdowns, and we couldn’t go more than five miles from our house. I was doing my essential shopping in ALDI, and then there was this £80 telescope.
"I had a snoop about and it looked like a really good piece of kit. They later went up in price to around £200, but I thought it looked like a great piece of kit for £80. I phoned up a few friends and told them to get themselves down to Aldi because they’ve got the most fantastic space scopes going at a really good price – and four or five buddies went down that afternoon and cleared them all out.
"From there, we began doing what we could from the back garden. Astrophotography can be quite expensive, so for £80, we were trying to do what we could with that telescope and a mobile phone.
"We were doing live feeds of the planets and people were coming online and talking and interacting – that became entertainment on a Friday or Saturday instead of going to the pub. It was lifting folks’ spirits, and they were learning about astronomy."
Stephen still uses his Aldi mount, and has spent a further £200 on additional lenses and tracking motors to aid his work. He has also added a Seestar S50 telescope to his collection. To take the photographs, he sets his scope up to the correct aperture and orientation, before linking it up to a camera app.
The scope takes snapshots of images in 10-second intervals, with the app stacking the pictures on top of each other to create the full image. After sharing his pictures online, Stephen was blown away by the reaction from his local community - and people quickly began asking questions about how they could get involved.
"It’s been quite overwhelming that you can be living on a council estate, like myself, and be capturing these images from your own back garden. People have been asking to come along, so I’m going to be running events where I can show people how to work the stuff and get the most out of it.
"I’m fairly sure that once I run these outreach events, I can show people how to do this themselves with the same setup. I’ve had messages asking me to show them how to do it, and I think that if I show them the full process, people will want to try and do it. I think that’s fantastic.
"That’s my goal – to help people learn to do this if they want to – and if they don’t, and they’re happy just to come out onto the hill with me and watch and get a couple of pictures of galaxies themselves, then that’s fine too."
