Pune: Search Moon in Google Search Engine and you will find thousands of images but below are the one which will leave you in awe.
Meet 16-year-old Prathamesh Jaju, an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer from Pune have managed to click one of the clearest and most detailed images of the Moon. The image, which has been shared widely on the social media, is a composite of 55,000 images which add up to over 186 GB in size.
Prathamesh on Instagram shared, “This is my most detailed and clearest shot of the third quarter Mineral Moon. I captured around 50,000+ images over 186 GigaBytes of Data which almost killed my laptop with the processing.”
“I first captured them by capturing multiple videos on different small areas of the Moon. Each video contains around 2000 frames, first, we stabilize them, then we merge and stack each video into one image. So I took around 38 videos. Now we have 38 images. We sharpen each one of them manually and then stitch them together in Photoshop like a big mosaic. Once the mosaic is done, some more adjustments are made and some final touch-ups and boom,” he added.
According to one of his Instagram captions for the image, Jaju said that he used Celestron 5 Cassegrain OTA (telescope), a ZWO ASI120MC-S super-speed USB camera while taking the photo. He further stated that he used a SkyWatcher 8” Collapsible Reflector Dobsonian with a Canon EOS 90D (with an APS-C CMOS sensor) for the colours. For the detailed post-processing, Jaju used softwares like PIPP, Autostakkert, IMPPG, Registax 6, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.
He continued that he refined the image on software like PIPP, Autostakkert, IMPPG, Registax 6, Adobe Photoshop, and Lightroom for detailed post-processing. “My laptop worked like a fine beast continuously working for a day and a half with the processing of this image,” he shared. He also noted that the image is an HDR Composite of two different images to bring out the perfect clarity in the image and do away with the digital noise.
