6d ago

Inspired by another pic on here, finally figured out the astrophotography mode on my phone camera - 5min exposure in rural Wales

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Awesome! I love how phone cameras these days have dedicated astro modes, you can get really good results with some tinkering.
I downloaded the photo and pushed it a bit further in iOS free Lightroom, you can squeeze a bit more faint detail out of them, especially if your phone can save RAW format photos.
Here:
- you can squeeze a bit more faint detail out of them
  What exactly did you do here? Up the contrast or something?
  
  Adjust the color curves I'm guessing
  
  I just played around with contrast, saturation of each color, a bit of shadows/ blacks and exposure, a bit of dehaze filter and some noise reduction if I remember correctly.
I wonder what's going on in the background there in processing the picture. 5 minutes exposure creates star trails even on a wide angle lens. Must be multiple exposures and focus stacking.
- Unsure, but it also outputs a time lapse at the same time where you can see the stars moving - I'd guess this is a by-product of the process (also cool that you can see some slight cloud movement which I didn't know was there before)
  
  Yeah this is generally how low light and HDR camera modes work - by taking multiple photos and then using a technique called "Stacking" to average out noise and improve signal (useful light).
  You can also just take 20-30 second exposures if your phone has a "pro" camera mode, then do the rest of the stacking with other tools. The astro mode simply does everything for you, but you get less control over the processing.
- It's taking a video and doing aligning/stacking of the frames like you said. Not taking an actual long exposure in the sensor. Most photos on modern phone cameras in low light are done this way. There's a cool paper by google on their algorithm.
What phones have this option? How would I find it?
- Google Camera on any Android will have the astro mode in Night Sight
  It requires the phone is perfectly stable or else it won't activate.
  also hey lmao
  
  Hmm I have something called "nightscape" but I think it can only do 30 second exposures
Very nice!
Very nice! Suddenly I feel very... small.
- Truly
  What always blows my mind is those milky parts are hundreds of millions of stars too faint to see on their own, most of which probably have planets
Wow, technology!

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