On Tuesday night I captured my clearest image of the moon *ever* by blending over 100,000 images, captured with a telescope in pristine conditions. Make sure you zoom in to properly experience it. [OC]

Image from preview.redd.it and submitted by ajamesmccarthy
image showing On Tuesday night I captured my clearest image of the moon *ever* by blending over 100,000 images, captured with a telescope in pristine conditions. Make sure you zoom in to properly experience it. [OC]

ajamesmccarthy on December 27th, 2020 at 00:00 UTC »

Make sure you expand the image and zoom in!

This is a composite image made of over 100,000 individual frames, captured with a special camera designed to shoot exceptionally high framerates to help me conquer the atmosphere's turbulent nature. By stacking the best images, I created a mosaic of the moon in the highest quality I've managed so far. There are mile-wide features visible clearly, something that is difficult to do from Earth.

The full size image is 209 megapixels (including some padding around the moon for the starfield), but it’s been downsized and had bit depth reduced to make it under the 20mb Reddit maximum. The full size uncompressed image file was nearly a GB. I could have potentially gotten it up to 890 megapixels with the right processing settings, but my computer kept crashing when I attempted it.

The gear I used for this shot was an EDGEHD 800 and an asi178mm for the lunar details, and a meade 70mm astrophograph to capture the background starfield, which was captured in the Sadr region and added to the scene as an aesthetic choice. The details on the "Earthshine" portion is actually an image of the full moon, which has been digitally realigned to compensate for the moon's "wobble" to accurately portray the positions of features on the unlit portion.

This image was captured the same night as my capture of the Grand Conjunction. After the planets set I took advantage of the good conditions (a rarity where I live) to get these detailed shots.

Check out more of my work here

kezhound13 on December 27th, 2020 at 00:13 UTC »

I needed something beautiful to look at tonight. Thank you. Wow.

PeckerTraxx on December 27th, 2020 at 00:58 UTC »

Can someone mark the Apollo mission landing sites?