The milky way photos above are both single exposure from OnePlus 3 camera. Recent high end smartphone cameras have built-in manual mode which allows us to control ISO, shutter speed, focus distance, white balance, RAW format and etc. This is very useful for night sky photography when we are allowed to use slow shutter speed to capture as much light as possible.
The exposure setting for the first image is ISO 1600, 30 seconds shutter time and the focus was set to infinity. I didn’t push the ISO to 3200 because there were light sources in the surroundings, it will look bright if ISO was set to 3200. For the second image, the setting is 30 seconds shutter time with ISO 3200 when I shot in a darker place.
Milky way photography is possible with high-end smartphone nowadays, tripod is highly recommended for steady shot since the camera shutter is opened for 30 seconds or you can rest the phone on something and use timer to start capturing. The images from smartphone camera are still not suitable for high resolution wallpaper or printing, but they are good enough for social media sharing since the resolution are reduced and the noise will be less visible. The image quality is still not on par with the image quality from DSLR especially in low light situation, but there is a lot of room for improvement in smartphone camera especially in software improvement. Apple, Samsung, Google, Huawei have been working hard on image processing to achieve low noise image, simulated bokeh effect, composite long exposure and etc, hence smartphone could be the future of photography, at least for non-professional photographers.