Astrophotography mode takes a 4 minute night sight exposure
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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It's called post processing. Generally it takes multiple frames and combines them or gets other camera data.
In theory, if this were true, you should be able to get a light, place it where the moon is and point it at it, and it should replace it with a moon. But it doesn't.
Im familiar with post processing.
To be clear, the assumption is that the algorithms the phone is using to determine you were trying to take a photo of the moon are "smart" enough to identify it as a photo of a night sky focused on the moon, rather than a light bulb. I'm not sure how you'd set up a light of the correct brightness at infinite focal length to test this though.
ETA: I've never seen this post processing happen so starkly with anything other than a photo of the moon, so it sticks out pretty hard. And I take a lot of photos at work of things that are tough to capture clearly.
I had to dig through my phone to find these photos when i got home from work, but they were taken literally seconds apart with my phone on full optical + digital zoom. The detail on the second is absolutely absurd, while the first is what I typically see on my screen when I've tried to replicate since.
I reckon it's just processing a raw capture. The only difference is exposure, which yeah, phones could easily post process.
There are literally tests of Samsung phones replacing a blurred jpeg of the moon (the data is lost, there is no way to recreate it) with detailed images of the moon after it is "identified" as the moon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/
It isn't post processing, it is image generation and merging it with the source image.