Google Quietly Drops Astrophotography Feature for Pixel Devices

The Google Camera app is one of the best photography tools available on Android. One of the cooler features of the Google Camera is the ability to take stunning astrophotography images.

However, the company has limited the feature with Google Camera 8.1, as a key aspect of the phone's astrophotography toolset has been dropped.

Google Camera App Drops Astrophotography Feature

If you were a fan of taking photos of outer space with your Pixel device, you're going to be disappointed. 9to5Google noticed that the astrophotography mode no longer lets users choose the 107-degree wide-angle camera, leaving users with the smaller field-of-view offered by the primary camera with 1X or greater zoom (the wide-angle mode uses a 0.6 zoom).

Previously, when in astrophotography mode, users could select the aforementioned 16MP shooter to take photos. Now, the app doesn't allow users to be in the wide-angle mode when switching to astrophotography. Instead, it forces users to switch to 1X zoom before it'll jump to the pitch-darkness capturing mode.

We're not sure why Google did this, but it could be because the wide-angle mode captured lower-quality photos, while the 1X mode captures better images that look sharper and more defined, even if not as wide.

Google Camera is Still Great

While it's unfortunate that Google dropped the wide-angle astrophotography mode, the phone still takes incredible pictures of outer space, which is more than many phones can say.