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Why does nobody mention that smartphone night mode shots of the Milky Way are stacked and processed, not single exposures?
I always dismissed phone astrophotography as fake until a guy at the Kansas City astronomy club showed me his raw files from a Pixel 7 and explained that the 4 minute night mode shot is actually 15 separate 16 second frames the phone aligns and stacks automatically, which is the same basic trick I use with DeepSkyStacker, just hidden from me.
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emmaking11h ago
The same thing happened to me after I got a tripod and tried it myself with my old Pixel 5, and seeing those individual frames stacked into one clean image totally changed how I look at it. Once you know the phone is just doing the same align-and-stack math your desktop software does, the only real difference is who pushes the button. It's wild how much the processing gets hidden, but the result is still real data, just handled for you.
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