The dust clouds along the Milky Way are clearly visible, the sky is covered with thousands of stars, and unlike human night vision, the picture is colorful. It shows significantly more detail than a person can see with the unaided eye on a night this dark. The image has not been retouched or post-processed in any way. The Milky Way as seen from the summit of Haleakala volcano on a cloudless and moonless September night, captured using the Google Camera App running on a Pixel 4 XL phone.
By allowing exposures up to 4 minutes on Pixel 4, and 1 minute on Pixel 3 and 3a, the latest version makes it possible to take sharp and clear pictures of the stars in the night sky or of nighttime landscapes without any artificial light. This year’s version of Night Sight pushes the boundaries of low-light photography with phone cameras. In a previous blog post our team described how Night Sight is able to do this, with a technical discussion presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2019. Night Sight, introduced last year as part of the Google Camera App for the Pixel 3, allows phone photographers to take good-looking handheld shots in environments so dark that the normal camera mode would produce grainy, severely underexposed images.
A few years ago experiments with phone camera nighttime photography produced pleasing results, but the methods employed were impractical for all but the most dedicated users. Taking pictures of outdoor scenes at night has so far been the domain of large cameras, such as DSLRs, which are able to achieve excellent image quality, provided photographers are willing to put up with bulky equipment and sometimes tricky postprocessing. Posted by Florian Kainz and Kiran Murthy, Software Engineers, Google Research
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