Computational astrophotography

Computational photography refers to image capture and processing techniques that aim to enhance upon optical processes absent from camera gear, a field that has grown substantially, especially for smartphone engineering. When clicking the shutter on your phone, you might think that the image captured was exactly what you saw, but nothing is further from the truth. This data requires heavy interpretation, and with the hardware restrictions on smartphones as well as the limitations dictated by the laws of Physics, the actual raw image received by a sensor can look like a colourful mess. A lot of colour-science and image-processing sits in between the sensor and what you see on screen. These problems are compounded for specific uses like astrophotography, where light from the heavens is faint and barely detectable by small sensors. The Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy of the University of Malta, in a project funded by the MCST Research Excellence Fund, has worked on the OPTICA project (OPtical Telescope Intelligence for Computational Astrophotography) to build software that allows for good astrophotography from small sensors in smartphones. The dynamics of...