Space, As Seen Through A Game Boy Camera

Most people don’t have Game Boy Cameras lying around, and if you do the pictures generally aren’t great quality.

Unless, as it turns out, you’re taking photos of the moon.

Alexander Pietrow is one such person who still holds the Game Boy Camera near and dear to his heart. An instrumentation and astronomy student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, he decided to whip out the 2bit beast to answer a question.

That question: what’s the Game Boy Camera like for shooting the moon?

“Using the 1838 6” Fraunhofer telescope in the Old Observatory of Leiden in combination with a ‘Gosky Universal Cell Phone Adapter’, it was relatively easy to properly align the camera with the telescope eyepiece,” Pietrow wrote on his blog. The PhD student took a shot of a clock tower to test, and after being satisfied that the experiment could work, he had a crack at the moon:

“The Moon was observed trough the viewfinder for a more zoomed out image and the main telescope for detailed shots. The viewfinder images are not very impressive, although the phase of the moon is clearly visible, especially when compared with a Stellarium image of that night.”

Pietrow later told Gizmodo that the whole setup involved a smartphone astrophotographer mount, Game Boy Advance SP, the camera, all of which was hooked into a PC for capturing.

After getting some success with the Moon, Pietrow tried something more challenging: Jupiter.

If you want to try this for yourself – provided you have the equipment lying around – Pietrow has more instructions on his blog.


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