[imvetri]

What are the possibilities that this AI camera app is not faking the image.

Here is why I ask - It has gyro - so knows whether we are pointing at sky or not. - AI checks whether its a clear sky - if yes - post fake image. If no - Dont risk getting caught. - Time + geo spacing - Gives the angle, position of camera relative to the space above us.

[PopePompus]

There is no chance this is being faked. I've been playing with the astrophotography mode on a Pixel 4 XL in a remote country location with no cell phone connectivity. A single 4 minute exposure is able to record stars down to about magnitude 9.5. A single exposure can detect the Crab Nebula, or the two brightest satellite galaxies of the Andromeda Galaxy (M 32 and NGC 205). To fake such results without internet connectivity would mean that the camera software would have to have an internal catalog of about 250,000 stars, with accurate colors and coordinates. It would need the size and shape of nebulae, the contours and brightness of the Milky Way, etc. When I add multiple frames, I see fainter stars appear, as they should, so the internal catalog would really need millions of stars, most of which would not show up unless the user carefully aligned multiple individual image and summed them. This is not being faked.

[Jyaif]

You do realize that with 2 floats to store the position of a star on a sphere, that's like 8 MB per million of star? With compression you can almost certainly get away with something like 2 bytes per stars.

And an other solution is to simply store a bitmap of the sphere around earth.

[PopePompus]

It also shows the positions of the planets correctly, so it would need to have an ephemeris, or planetary orbital elements. Meteors and satellites show trails across the star field. At some point simulating all of this would be more complicated than really doing it.

[kevingadd]

"Faking" isn't thinking about it right. There's no point in going through all the trouble of manually constructing a fake sky photo like that when you can just aggressively train a machine learning model to produce good-looking skies in photographs, which they appear to have done for the purposes of things like adjusting the brightness of the sky in night-time photos. In the end, it's not a question of whether it's "fake", just how much of the resulting photo is the invention of a neural net instead of the result of light hitting the sensor.

In the end photography like this is art, though, so if the person taking the shot is happy with it, then it's fine, probably. Just don't enter it in a competition with rules against retouching...

[macintux]

This reminds me of the argument over the moon landing: effectively it was easier to go there than to try to fake the live coverage, because the video technology to fake it wasn't available.

https://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/technology/was-the-moon-landi...