Better night shots through multiples

Here's a nice sunset Ray took.
If you click on it, you'll notice that is has excellent image quality and no noise, despite having been taken in poor light and with a small-sensor (super-zoom) camera.

Ray said:

These are from the Nikon Coolpix P510.
It seems to do better on a night shot than previous cameras have, and I think it does it with multiple exposures, very fast together, because when the shutter is depressed to take the pic, it makes several little chirping sounds and the LCD goes blank for a brief moment, and then it shows what you were taking.

This is clearly becoming common on compact cameras, though oddly not promoted much (I wonder if they don't think people will understand it?). Yet another advantage to the simple growth of processing power in small devices. The camera computes out the noise in each little area of the picture by comparing different frames and then combining the best into one image. If that's not impressive enough, it can also do it with hand-held shots, meaning it has to correct for different camera positions and rotation through the different frames!

My Sony RX100 can do it, for example. Only it is irritating that it when set to do it, it does it on all pictures and in all light conditions, not just when high ISO is set. That's less helpful, in bright light it really makes no difference, except making problems with moving subjects. It really should only do it over ISO 800, for example (could be adjustable, but I don't find such a setting).