The Incredible Power of Your Cell Phone Camera… at 42 Light-Yards
… At 300 Meters
My family was on vacation recently in Lewes, Delaware, USA. From our rental room we were looking across America’s East Coast’s Intracoastal Waterway — essentially a large canal at our location — and noticed some folks doing Zumba on the deck at some building. We wondered what building it was, to see when the next class was. The building had a sign so I took a picture of it with my iPhone 6plus. Here’s roughly what the image looked like after zooming in at the max, 10x zoom.
But on my daughter’s iPhone 10-something, or whatever the heck is the most money you can spend on a future paperweight, it got a little better because it has 15x zoom… but still not legible. But if you then open the photo in the editor and zoom in in the editor, the sign is clearly legible: “Dockmaster.”
… At 36 Kilometers
The next day, we were on the beach. I noticed I could spot two dots on the far horizon, across the Delaware bay. Here’s the iPhone photo, roughly what it looks like to the naked eye. I’ve scaled the image to try to approximate how it looks, based on the fact that I could see the dots but others in the family could not make them out. They were really small dots that disappeared with the slightest haze.
On the left you see a sailboat. Can you see the two dots on the right side of the horizon? I determined by confirming with Google maps that they are nuclear plant cooling towers that I was familiar with from driving in New Jersey. They’re the towers of Middle Energy Center in Rio Grande, New Jersey. Here’s what it looks like zoomed in.
And how far is this, that an iPhone 6s can pick up two little dots? 36 kilometers (22 miles). Here’s the Google map showing the distance.
… At 42.9 Light-Yards
Light-yard? What the hell is a light-yard? I’ll explain later.
This time I was looking out across another body of water, but looking skyward. A friend on a fishing trip showed me an object in the sky, with very good binoculars, and it clearly flashed red and blue. He was sure it was a satellite, almost certainly recording our every move, perhaps making sure we threw back all those huge fish. Seemed like a slam dunk to me. It was too distinct to be a star. It was one of those brighter stars on the lower left of the image below. Hmm, doesn’t even appear in this photo.
After a bit of Internet fishing, slightly more productive but not as fun as getting sunburned and drunk on a boat, I found a site that authoritatively proclaimed, “We get questions every year at this time about this.” It is the star Capella, 6th brightest object in the sky. And when it is low in the sky the normal refraction process of our atmosphere is even stronger, producing the distinct flash. If I understood the explanation correctly, it’s the normal twinkle of all stars, but on steroids. Staroids. End of mystery.
But then I remembered how surprising my cell phone camera was. So I took a few images. And I zoomed in with the photo editor and cropped. And I zoomed in again… and again… and again.
And damned if it doesn’t clearly show the color shift. I could see on the phone, slightly visible in the first of the 5 images, that I was down to the pixels. It looks like the star takes about 50 pixels of width/height. This is pretty incredible… 42.9 light-yards — oops, I mean light-years — away. Could a good mathematician, with the right specs, figure out the distance of Capella from my phone pixels?
As for light-yards, I’m proposing that we change “light-years” to “light-yards” to help people cope with the fact that it’s distance, not time. When the Imperial measurement system dies and takes ‘yards’ with it, my new name, light-yard will remain as a quaint remnant, and more helpful than the old unit name. And for the purists who say “impossible, because it’s technically wrong,” I say that there are plenty of units of measure with arbitrary names, like Newton and Joule; they’re not all descriptive. Get over it. And remember, this is where “light-yard” was born.
