Why does night photography require the use of manual controls while daytime photography can get by with Auto Mode?
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The extremely low light levels at night require the camera shutter to be open for a much longer time — sometimes several seconds to minutes. Daytime has hundreds to thousands of times more light, so the shutter is only open for tiny fractions of a second.
Because the shutter is open for so long, cameras require a tripod (or extremely stable mout) and had a manual release cable installed so the vibration caused by pressing the shutter button didn’t cause light trails on the film. The manual release greatly reduced any movement caused by your finger so the camera didn’t shake.
Modern cameras assume the area of interest is the brightspot in the field of view so the iris and shutter are set for those levels. If you are interested in a galaxy or the milkyway “skyglow”, you need to override the automatics and manually tell the camera what you want it to do.
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