Copasetic Flow

 Hot on the heels of the night-vision Google pixel articles, Simon Willison clears up something I've often wondered about. Some of the metadata in jpeg IS in binary! Even better though, Simon mentioned that Chat GPT can help read a photo's binary metadata fields.

My recent POTA photographs of the Aurora Borealis from New Mexico were only possible because of the night mode of my Samsung 23S phone. I haven't located anything about how Samsung's night mode works, but I have accumulated a list of links about the Google Pixel's night mode. Here they are https://research.google/blog/night-sight-seeing-in-the-dark-on-pixel-phones/ https://research.google/blog/experimental-nighttime-photography-with-nexus-and-pixel/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/18tdBq1ROkQ9FGHtWd1RFtRC_7byOg-ji/view https://research.google/blog/astrophotography-with-night-sight-on-pixel-phones/ https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2980179.2980254

 Sigh... I used to never, ever take Android updates. I need to get back into that habit again. After the latest update, my Panasonic camera would no longer transfer images to my phone. Just like that, the whole, really nice feature was swizzled and dead. Fortunately, grahamashton.net ran into the same issue back in 2017 and has a workable solution ! Because things disappear on the internet, here's the crux of it. Put your phone in airplane mode, then, and only then, hook up to your camera over wifi. Somehow the lack of a cell data network makes everything feel better for the phone.

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...