Google Pixel Camera update offers a manual option to enable astrophotography mode

Search engine giant Google has done a great job of optimizing hardware and computational photography technology so that Pixel phones can take better photos than any competing brand.

Now the native Pixel camera has gotten even better with the latest update v9.5.

It offers a manual option for astrophotography mode. After updating to the latest version, the phone turns on night mode at night and offers a slide down option to turn on astrophotography.

This is a huge improvement to the photography experience on Pixel phones. Previously, users had to mount the Pixel phone on a tripod or stable platform, point the camera at the sky, and sit idle for a few minutes for Astrophotography mode to activate.

Now Pixel phone owners can manually enable Astrophotography mode. Note that the app will prompt the user to place the Pixel phone on a tripod to get a good photo of the night sky with glittering stars and planetary objects, but users can ignore the pop-up message.

In a related development, Google introduced the brand new Imagen 3, an advanced AI-based text-to-image generator.

With the default settings, Imagen 3 can produce photorealistic images in Full HD resolution (1024 x 1024) that can be upscaled by 2, 4 or 8 times.

It is also said to be better than current AI generators such as Midjourney, DALL-E 3 and X’s Grok-2.

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