Image credit – Alexander Pietrow
In today’s megapixel race, camera manufacturers and smartphone makers love to tout how many megapixels their cameras have. While that is good for certain professions and purposes, like if you wanted to print a huge billboard for example, at the end of the day uploading to social media platforms or just sharing among friends, megapixels aren’t quite as important.
In fact if you wanted a good example of that, astrophotographer Alexander Pietrow recently uploaded photographs (via PetaPixel) that he took of the moon and Jupiter, and the kicker is that he managed to grab photos by using a Game Boy Camera. Yup, in case you didn’t know, there used to be an accessory for the Game Boy back in 1998 called the Game Boy Camera.
It was a 2-bit camera that featured a 128×112 CMOS sensor and according to Pietrow, “I am not the only one who thinks this way as countless mods and hacks can be found on the internet, where people use this little camera in ways that Nintendo probably never envisioned. In line with this mentality I wondered if it would be possible to do astrophotography with this camera. Searching the internet I was surprised that nobody had tried this before and decided to give it a go.”
To capture images of the moon and Jupiter, Pietrow hooked up the camera with a 1838 6” Fraunhofer telescope at the Old Observatory of Leiden. The resulting images wouldn’t exactly be something that you would publish in a magazine, but given the technology of the camera, we have to say that the results are pretty impressive, and for more details you can check out Pietrow’s website.
Filed in . Read more about Digital Cameras, Game Boy and Nintendo.