The official camera for the Game Boy was a tough sell back when it launched in 1998. However, over time it has become a collector's item among die-hard Nintendo fans and has also been used in several DIY projects. One of the most recent is by Alexander Pietrow, who adapted the camera to an old telescope to capture images of the Moon, Jupiter, and three of its main moons.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Game Boy camera is that it works on all available models (with the sole exception of the Game Boy Micro, which lacks the necessary backward compatibility), although the more modern variants of the console can do little to compensate for its natural limitations. The CMOS sensor has a resolution of 128 by 128 pixels, but the effective capture is 128 by 112 pixels. The idea was for the camera to be accompanied by the official printer, so the user could get physical copies of their photos... and I mean prints similar in size to a postage stamp. Nineteen years after its launch, what can we do with the Game Boy camera beyond taking selfies in a two-bit palette? Well... how about photographing Jupiter?
Astrophotography with a Handheld
Alexander Pietrow did exactly that at the Leiden Observatory, after connecting his Game Boy Advance SP equipped with the camera to an old Fraunhofer telescope. Aligning the camera to the telescope was a simple process thanks to a universal smartphone mount, while the biggest problem was the weather. Pietrow had to wait for a friendly night (i.e., without clouds), and did his first tests aiming at a nearby church tower.
A couple of weeks later the sky decided to cooperate, giving way to the Moon and Jupiter. The gas giant appears as a clear white dot on the screen, but the camera managed to record three of its four Galilean satellites.
Getting the Photos Off
Extracting the images from the camera is (in my opinion) much more complicated. The procedure requires additional hardware in the form of cables, flash carts, and a computer with a real parallel port, using XP as the operating system.
