Standing on the vast salt flats of Uyuni in Bolivia, beneath one of the darkest skies I’ve ever experienced, I had two very different astrophotography setups working side by side.
While my DWARF Mini was busy capturing the night sky, I set up my Sony A7 III on a small tripod, connected the little ONNOA SmartTimer Pro intervalometer, pointed the camera towards the Milky Way… and left it quietly taking image after image.
And I’m very glad I did.
Setting Up in Almost Complete Darkness
One thing photographs don’t really convey is just how dark it was.
Once you are away from the lights on the Uyuni salt flats, you’re standing in almost pitch blackness. That’s wonderful for astrophotography, but considerably less wonderful when you’re trying to operate a camera and remember which tiny button does what!
This is where I really appreciated the ONNOA app.
The SmartTimer connects to the phone via Bluetooth, so rather than trying to fiddle with a conventional intervalometer in the dark, I could set up the sequence from the screen of my phone.
The app gives you control over the timing and number of exposures and offers far more than the simple repeated shutter release I needed that night. There are linear timelapses, interval ramping, long Bulb exposures, remote triggering and the ability to save settings as presets.
For astrophotography, that opens up all sorts of possibilities.
For my Milky Way experiment, though, I wanted to keep things simple.
I had brought with me the tripod base of a mono pod I own. It’s very sturdy and small.
I positioned the Sony A7 III on the tripod, composed the Milky Way, manually focused the lens, selected the exposure settings I wanted on the camera and then used the ONNOA app to tell the SmartTimer how I wanted it to take the sequence of photographs.
Then I pressed Start.
And that was basically it.
Once the sequence is running, the SmartTimer doesn’t need your phone to remain connected. It carries on triggering the camera independently.
Every so often I’d glance across at the Sony sitting there in the darkness, but otherwise the ONNOA was simply getting on with the job.
That’s exactly what I want from a gadget.
Not something that demands constant attention, but something that allows me to set up an idea and then forget about it while it does what I asked.
The Magic Happened Back Home
Of course, each photograph on its own was only part of the story.
When I returned home, I took the series of exposures captured by the Sony and stacked them using Starry Landscape Stacker. Stacking multiple photographs helps bring out the detail in the night sky while reducing some of the noise that inevitably comes with photographing in such low light.
I then finished the resulting image in Lightroom.
And the result is the photograph you see above.
I was genuinely delighted with it.
Small Gadgets Can Make a Big Difference
The ONNOA can do considerably more than I asked of it in Uyuni. Its app supports sophisticated timelapse sequences, changing intervals, long exposures and saved presets, making it an interesting little tool for everything from sunsets and landscapes to star trails and astrophotography.
But sometimes the best demonstration of technology isn’t using every feature it has.
It’s discovering that it makes something you wanted to do easier.
That’s what happened for me in Uyuni.
I didn’t want a complicated second astrophotography rig. I wanted to put the Sony on a tripod, point it towards that magnificent sky, tell it to keep taking photographs and then walk away.
The ONNOA allowed me to do exactly that.
And when a tiny gadget you can almost forget you’ve packed helps you come home with an image of the Milky Way like this, I’d say it has more than earned its place in my camera bag.
That’s the beauty of this tiny device. It simply gets on with the job, automatically triggering a sequence of exposures while you’re free to enjoy the night — or, in my case, play with another telescope!
You don’t always need a mountain of complicated equipment to have a go at astrophotography. Sometimes a simple little gadget like the ONNOA Pro opens up possibilities you might never have tried before.
For me, that’s what makes gadgets like this so much fun.
Sometimes astrophotography really can be as simple as setting up a camera, pressing Start and seeing what the universe gives you.
