[Kye]

This is probably harder for people to believe if they've never seen a progress video of stacking long exposures.

I've seen the kinds of images people get out of stacking images for astrophotography. Individually, the images are mostly noise. Put enough together and you get stuff like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20230512210222/https://imgur.com... (https://old.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/comments/3gx29m/st...)

The phone is operating under way less harsh conditions since there's usually quite a bit of light even in most night scenes.

The iPhone is actually too good at this. You can't do light trails: it over-weights the first image and removes anything too divergent when stacking, so you get a well-lit frozen scene of vehicles on the road. I can get around it shooting in burst mode and stack in something like Affinity Photo, but that's work.

[amluto]

I would argue that it’s both more and less harsh. The available light is probably better, but the astrophotography use case generally benefits from tripods and compensated or at least predictable movement of the subject. On the other hand, astrophotography needs to deal with atmospheric effects, and people aren’t usually taking night mode iPhone photos through the turbulent air above a flame.