Milky Way with the P20 Pro

Earlier this year, in late April, I went shooting the Milky Way at Sri Kandi Resort, Mersing with a group of friends from Sabah Stargazers. However, the weather was not ideal and the sky was very cloudy so I decided to take time-lapse of the moving clouds instead. And while waiting for the clouds to clear, I set up a mini tripod to try shooting the Milky Way with the Huawei P20 Pro.

I took the first shot with the Huawei P20 Pro in Pro mode and only manually set it to manual focus (MF). The resulting image looks quite good on the phone. I was quite surprise that the ISO was automatically set at 526 instead of some higher value.

Milky Way shot with the Huawei P20 Pro JPEG SOOC

Next, I changed the settings in the camera Pro mode.

Then I took another shot at ISO 1600. The image was brighter but a lot more grainy.

I would have done more tests at ISO between 500 and 1600 to check the graininess if not for the very cloudy sky. Would ISO 640 or 800 give a better image of the stars?

Huawei P20 Pro vs Fujifilm X-T1 (SOOC)