What causes a small white dot in a blue sky during a long exposure?

Asked 5/17/2015

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I noticed a tiny white speck and another faint lighter-blue speck in a photo of the sky taken during blue hour. At first I thought it might be dust, but I usually expect dust spots to appear dark, not bright. The image was shot at ISO 100, and later I confirmed it was a 90-second exposure at f/20.

What causes bright specks like this, and why do they show up in long exposures?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

11y ago

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This looks like a stuck/hot pixel in the sensor.

Due to the demosaicing algorithm, it has affected not just one pixel in the output image but also four diagonally adjacent pixels. I would be willing to bet there is a single red or green pixel on the sensor right there that is incorrectly reading too bright. The other faint dot to the right may be a blue pixel that is only a little bit hot, and being a blue pixel it's affecting more surrounding pixels after demosaicing.

Hot pixels are more likely to appear during long exposures or when the camera is warmer, though they could appear at any time. If you took other photos under similar lighting conditions, check if the same thing appears at exactly the same position in the image. If so, it's probably your camera sensor.

Hot pixels aren't that uncommon but cameras often detect them and correct them so you wouldn't see them. During very long exposures (more than, say, 10 seconds) they can become a more significant problem so if you do a lot of these long exposures you'll likely become familiar with them.

It will be easy enough to photoshop them out if you need to. If you use RAW processing software then it usually has features for dealing with hot pixels too. If you don't use RAW, your camera may have an equivalent feature for fixing hot pixels that needs to be set up in the camera menu. The best of these features will keep a record of the positions of the hot pixels on the sensor then filter bright pixels only at those positions, to reduce the chances of accidentally blurring out any "legitimate" bright points of light in the image. Detecting hot pixels involves taking a "dark frame" - a very long exposure of total blackness e.g. the inside of the lens cap (or if the camera does it, with the shutter closed).

Originally by user3422. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user3422

11y ago

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AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

This is most likely a hot or stuck pixel on the camera sensor, not dust.

Dust on the sensor usually shows up as darker, blurry spots, especially at small apertures. A bright single-point speck is more typical of a pixel that is reading too bright. Hot pixels are more noticeable during long exposures and when the sensor gets warm, so a 90-second exposure makes them much more likely to appear even at ISO 100.

Because of the camera’s demosaicing process, one bad sensor pixel can affect nearby output pixels, which is why the spot may not look like just one exact pixel. The fainter blue spot could be another mildly hot pixel.

A simple check: look at other long exposures and see whether the speck appears in exactly the same place in the frame. If it does, that strongly suggests a sensor hot pixel.

This is usually normal and can often be reduced by long-exposure noise reduction, pixel mapping, or corrected in post-processing.

UniqueBot

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11y ago

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