Google has published on their blog an explanation of how its Night Sight allows for astrophotography with Pixel phones.

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. 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.

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. This year’s version of Night Sight pushes the boundaries of low-light photography with phone cameras. 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.

The amount of light detected by the camera’s image sensor inherently has some uncertainty, called “shot noise,” which causes images to look grainy. The visibility of shot noise decreases as the amount of light increases; therefore, it is best for the camera to gather as much light as possible to produce a high-quality image.

How much light reaches the image sensor in a given amount of time is limited by the aperture of the camera lens. Extending the exposure time for a photo increases the total amount of light captured, but if the exposure is long, motion in the scene being photographed and unsteadiness of the handheld camera can cause blur. To overcome this, Night Sight splits the exposure into a sequence of multiple frames with shorter exposure times and correspondingly less motion blur. The frames are first aligned, compensating for both camera shake and in-scene motion, and then averaged, with careful treatment of cases where perfect alignment is not possible. While individual frames may be fairly grainy, the combined, averaged image looks much cleaner.

More info on Google AI Blog.