No more Wide-Angle Astrophotography in Google Pixel Update

Image Credits: Google

For a lot of people, this change has gone unnoticed, but Google appears to have taken away Pixel phones ability to shoot astrophotography out of their wide-angle lenses. It only affected Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a, 5G owners. 

In the 8.1 November update, Google made the changes on the camera, then several people on Google’s support forum have noticed. They shared and compared pictures taken with both standard and wide-angle lenses, and noticed how the wide-angle shots turned out greenish, others could no longer use the wide-angle lens when shooting at the stars.

Two weeks before people notice, at the beginning of November, Google appears to have changed a support document for Night Sight, telling Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G owners that they should only expect astrophotography mode to work with 1x zoom or greater. This makes much more sense since it would read 0.6x when using the wide-angle lens, it’s no longer working in this mode. 

There’s no reason to believe Google will bring this option back. With a change to their support doc, it’s clear that this was intentional. The question left is whether or not they meant to let you shoot astrophotography with the wide-angle lens out of the gate and took it away after seeing poor results or if this was never meant to be a feature at all.

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