Let’s say you were trying to use the very impressive wide angle astrophotography on your Pixel phone camera and you just noticed that it is missing, disabled or has been removed. We think we might know what is going on here and in this guide we will help you look for a solution.
Why is wide angle astrophotography missing on Pixel camera?
First lets try to understand what happened.
The wide angle astrophotography was a feature available on Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G phones only specially because only those two phones offer the ultra wide camera in the Pixel lineup. To enable the feature you go capture the night sky by pointing the phone up pointing towards the sky and keeping it still but now after the Google Camera 8.1 update when you go to Night Side mode and switch to ultra-wide angle you will get an error “Zoom to 1x for astrophotography”
It is believed that Google quietly removed the feature because of a bug that was reported on the Pixel forums. On investigation they might have found out that they can’t fix this bug with a software update so they had to eventually remove the feature completely.
Google has even updated the Google Camera Help docs to reflect the removal of the feature without openly accepting it: “On Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5, astrophotography only works on zoom settings equal to or greater than 1x.”
Solution for wide angle astrophotography missing
The only solution here might be to report to Google about how disappointing this whole scenario is. Please send feedback directly to the team via Settings > About phone > Send feedback about this device.
There is no other official workaround for this since Google itself has disabled or removed the feature without giving advance notice.
One way is to hunt for other astrophotography apps on Playstore and look for ones that you think might work for you. While you are at it, you might also want to check out our review of best 5 indie games on Android for Dec 2020
Hope this helps and if you have any questions or comments please post below.
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