Game Boy Camera

Just when you thought the humble Game Boy Camera couldn't get any cooler, someone comes along and takes detailed photos of the moon with it.

Enter Alex, a Reddit user who connected a Game Boy Camera to an antique telescope in order to take grainy photos of the Moon and Jupiter.

In his own words:

The Game Boy Camera is a monochrome, 2bit, 128×112 pixel CMOS camera from 1998 that was especially made to work with the Nintendo Game Boy. It is well known as the first affordable portable digital camera and was actually considered decent in its day. Currently it is not much more than a curiosity from days long past, but nevertheless fun to play with. 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. 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. The biggest issue was a typical Dutch one: waiting for a cloudless night.

We're quite impressed with how these photos turned out, there is a nice quality to the pixelated craters on the moon.

The moon

Hop over to Alex's page and check out the rest of his photo gallery and let us know what you think with a comment below.

[source home.strw.leidenuniv.nl, via reddit.com]