Someone Put a Game Boy Camera on a 100-Inch Telescope and Photographed Jupiter

The Game Boy Camera came out in 1998 as a novelty. It shot in four shades of gray at a resolution of 128 by 112, which works out to a little over a hundredth of a megapixel, and Nintendo sold it as a toy for taking goofy self-portraits and stamping them on Game Boy Printer stickers. Twenty-eight years later, Chris Graue pointed one at Jupiter and it worked.

Graue and his friend Drew van Oort mounted the little camera to the Hooker Telescope, the historic 100-inch instrument at Mount Wilson Observatory, using a 3D-printed adapter that slots into a standard telescope eyepiece. The math on that pairing is absurd: the effective focal length comes out around 730,000mm, which is not a lens anyone has ever bolted a Game Boy accessory to before. And it produced an actual photograph of Jupiter, cloud bands and all, rendered in the camera’s handful of chunky grays. By the reckoning of the small and wonderful community of Game Boy Camera astrophotographers, it is the longest lens and the most distant object anyone has shot with the thing.

The best part is what he did next. Graue released the schematics for the adapter for free, along with a tutorial, so anyone with a printer, an eyepiece, and a 1998 toy can go do this themselves. That is the retro hobby at its most generous: not just keeping old hardware alive, but finding it a new job nobody imagined for it, and then handing everyone else the blueprints. The Game Boy Camera was never supposed to see this far. It does now, and it is open source.