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Heard a NASA engineer say phone cameras are ruining our night sky pics
Overheard a guy at the coffee shop who works at JPL talking about how modern phone processing adds fake stars and dims real ones in astrophotography. He said 90% of the "nebula" shots on Instagram are actually phone noise being hallucinated. Made me rethink posting that Orion photo I took last week.
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young.michael16d ago
Buddy of mine tried it and got a pic that looked like static on an old TV.
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That 90% stat is wild but honestly it makes sense. I used to think my phone was catching all these cool deep sky objects but now I realize it was just making stuff up. I tried turning off all the AI processing on my Samsung and the difference is crazy, the real stars look way dimmer and there's way less fake nebulosity. Kinda bums me out that most people will never see what our eyes would actually see.
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blair_chen8116d ago
Ngl I tried that too with my old phone and ended up with a photo that looked like a kid spilled glitter on black construction paper. Thought I discovered a new galaxy but it was just my camera sensor having a meltdown in the dark. At least with the AI faking it you get something that looks kinda impressive instead of just a blurry mess that screams "I pointed my phone at the sky.
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charles_baker2816d ago
I mean I kinda see it differently. Yeah the AI adds stuff that's not really there, but isn't that just what cameras have always done with longer exposures? It's not like a regular camera lens is what your eyes see either. Idk, I think the fake nebulosity looks cool and it got me into actually learning what real astrophotography looks like.
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