Things I Learned: How Night Sight Photography on Pixel Phones Works

I've had a number of intersting photos and videos come out of the Pixel 6a over the last few months of camping—especially in New Mexico. Most of them involve evidence of things in flight—think meteors—during minutes long exposures. Clearly meteors don't fly overhead for minutes at a time, so I needed to better understand what the phone was doing. Here are the articles I found so far.

Astrophotography with Night Sight on Pixel Phones

Night Sight: Seeing in the Dark on Pixel Phones

Handheld Mobile Photography in Very Low Light

The third one was written by the authors for a conference, so is a bit more of a scholarly read than the first two. Together the papers address that the phone is using HDR+ techology to average over pictures to get a better picture, (hence the ability to capture the movement of meteors in a four minute exposure), but none of them mention if there might be parameters embedded in the video or associated image that reveal how long the meteor took to pass over head. Information like this would answer the question, was it a meteor, or an airplane?

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