Clearest Image Of Moon Captured By Indian Teen
A 16-year-old Indian teen is making headlines for capturing the clearest and most stunning picture of the moon by compiling over 50,000 images.
Isn’t our moon a photographic tease? It hangs up there in the sky, all bright and big, but when you try to take a picture of it, you only get a white blob floating in the darkness. Well, the case was not so with the Indian teen who pieced together numerous images of the moon to obtain the clearest picture of our natural satellite. Read on to find out more about his astronomical feat.
Teen from Pune captures the clearest image of the moon
A 16-year-old amateur astrophotographer from Pune in Maharashtra has gone viral on social media for capturing one of the most detailed and beautiful images of the moon. He created the three-dimensional shot by composting more than 50,000 images, which was over 186 GigaBytes of data that almost killed his laptop during the processing.
About Prathamesh Jaju
Prathamesh Jaju calls himself an amateur astrophotographer and astronomer and has recently gained eminence for capturing the clearest image of the third quarter Mineral Moon. Jaju is associated with Jyotirvidya Parisanstha (JVP), one of the oldest astronomy clubs in India, where he learned basic astrophotography over the last three to four years. The class 10 student was finally able to make time for the project after his board exams got canceled amid the COVID-19 lockdown.
5 hours to capture, 40 hours to process
It took Jaju five hours to capture the only natural satellite of the earth, using his telescope and camera. He took another 40 hours to process the image employing different editing software. Jaju in his Instagram post is seen calling the shot Last Quarter Mineral HDR Moon Composite, and he further revealed that he captured nearly 38 panels at 1500 and 3000mm Focal Length with a 1.2megapixel ZWO ASI120MC-S, which made the image almost 50 megapixels huge.
50,000 Images
A lot of you may wonder why he had to take 50,000 images and not a single shot. The teen explained the reason as follows: “Often single images get pixelated and blurred when we zoom into them. To avoid that I used a mosaic technique, which in layman’s terms is called panoramic photography.” The raw data of the images was 100GB and after all the images were stitched together, the final file was around 600MB. After stitching the photos Jaju sharpened the image to see crisp details of the moon.
Clearest image
Jaju used enormous magnifications and captured multiple videos of the moon which also displayed small craters. The image is so clear that one could easily zoom in as much as possible, without losing the minute details. The image curated by Jaju holds enormous scientific value, as different colors seen in the picture indicate the presence of mineral deposits on the lunar surface.
So, hurry up and have a look at the image captured by Jaju!