system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why can I not take a good photo of the night sky?

Whenever I do, it is typically just a black photo.
gpt
Those good pictures of the sky you see are taken with cameras on tripods set to long exposure. The exposure on a camera is how long the shutter stays open to light light onto the film or digital sensor. In the daytime or with good lighting, the shutter only needs to open for a fraction of a second in order to let enough light in to take a picture. When the only light is coming from the stars, you need to have the shutter open for much longer so more light can gather on the sensor.

As an analogy, think of light (photons) as ping pong balls and the camera as a set of buckets. With lots of light it means there are tons of ping pong balls being thrown at the buckets at once and they fill up fast. When photographing the sky, only a few balls (photons) from each star may be hitting the buckets, so in order for it to show up, you need to let the ping pong balls collect in the buckets for a longer time.