 Hey everyone, Nico Carver here, nebulaphotos.com. This is another installment of Five Minute Fridays, where every Friday I just do a short video on something that's on my mind. And this week I'm going to do a rundown of three apps that are useful, I think, for astrophotographers. So let's just go ahead and jump in. All of these are available, I think, on Android and iOS. I'm gonna start with PhotoPills, which is a $10 app. I think it's well worth that. It has some just handy features. You can look at what the sun is doing every day and know, like, for instance, when does nighttime start? So 1030, that's useful. I mean, and you can actually make this a widget. And so I've done that. I can just show that real quick here, just like that. So I can see exactly when astronomical twilight ends at 1030. It also says when the galactic center is visible. So right now it's mid-summer, so the galactic center is visible right at the beginning of nighttime. And it also tells me right down here how much nighttime with no moon. So four hours and 34 minutes tonight, pretty good. If it only weren't so cloudy. Okay, other than that, other than just that, I mean, that alone, just making it so easy, making it a widget-able, I think I'd pay $10 for that. But it has way more than that. It of course has really great planning features and I'm not gonna be able to show in a five minute video. But the one that I do wanna just mention really quickly here because I use it so much is the SpotStars. This has a camera database and you can also put in any lens focal length. And then it can tell you the 500 rule versus the NPF rule. And not only that, it has the super strict NPF rule and also the less strict one. And so what I do is if it's a single exposure kind of thing like a single exposure Milky Way or Aurora, I use the default NPF rule, which is telling me 13 seconds with a 14 millimeter lens and a Canon 6D. If I'm planning to stack like stack 100 or 200 pictures, then I use the accurate NPF rule. And again, this is for untracked astrophotography, which is something that I'm really into and have a bunch of videos about. Okay, this is quick, I realized, but we're just gonna go ahead and move right along here to Sky Safari. And Sky Safari is my favorite planetarium app. It comes in different flavors depending on how much you wanna pay. I've paid for the most expensive one called the Pro version. For me, it's worth it. You can look at sort of the feature list and decide what's worth it to you. I will say that you might wanna wait for a sale because they often have really good sales on the Sky Safari apps. Like around the holidays, I think they go for up to like 40 or 50% off. Okay, so how do I use this? This already knows my location because it pulls it down from the GPS on my phone. And so then I can just say, okay, I know nighttime starts at 1030 because that's what photo pills told me. And now I can look at anything here in Cygnus and Cepheus, which is where I'm planning to shoot. And so I can see with my Rokinon 135 and my Canon 6D, that's how the elephant trunk is set up. That's because I've set those in my equipment database, but I have a bunch more in here as well. So if I wanted to see instead what the elephant trunk looks like with my stellar view telescope and my QHY268, I just turn that on, hit back, and it's been added right there to the screen. And I can add as many of these field of view indicators as I want, which is really handy for planning. I can quickly zoom in here just by doing a pinch motion and see, oh yeah, so the whole elephant trunk part of it fits in my field, but I don't get the full emission nebula there. The last one may be a little bit weird because it's not a planning tool, it's actually an editing tool. And the reason I wanna show this one is because I've been getting more and more into doing astrophotography just with my phone. So like Milky Way shooting with my phone. And the natural conclusion to that is if I can shoot astrophotography with my phone, why not also try editing it on the phone? And so Snapseed is my favorite so far. This one, you just open up a picture. So this is a picture straight from my phone of the Milky Way, this is a 30 second exposure I took with a barn door tracker. And then to edit it right here on the phone, I could just click tools and tune image. And then if you sort of swipe up and down, you can pick different options here. So I'm gonna pick the shadows and bring those way down. I'm gonna pick contrast and bring that up a little bit and I'll pick saturation and bring that up too. But when I brought up saturation since, this is a normal color filter array so there's a lot of green noise. It really brought up a lot of green in the picture. So then what I can do is I can go into back into tools here and go to curves. And just like in Photoshop, which I've shown many times, we have the normal luminance or RGB curve here. But if I click right there, I can pick my green curve and just bring that down just a little bit. And just like that, I've edited a picture of the Milky Way right here on Snapseed on my phone. I can export it, save a copy, share that to Instagram. So this is something I really wanna get more into is fully smartphone astrophotography because I think it's gonna be a really big deal in the next few years. Hope this was a handy five minute Friday for you. Until next time, again, this is Nico Carver, NebulaFotos.com, Clear Skies.