This Stunning And Detailed Image Of The Moon Is Made From A Combination Of 280,000 Photos
Andrew McCarthy Is A Creative Photographer Who Combined 280,000 Photos To Create An Incredibly Detailed Image Of The Moon Called Gigamoon.
Andrew McCarthy, the artist who created the so-called GigaMoon, told PetaPixel: “My computer hard drives have filled up many times with failed attempts to develop GigaMoon. “I check the weather conditions daily with a particular Astro-weather program.
Since the weather forecast for the evening of April 29 was good, McCarthy decided to re-examine the conditions for photographing the moon. McCarthy used an 11-inch telescope with a focal length of 7,000 mm. Temperature variations between layers of the atmosphere can blur the image of the moon when zoomed in at such a level.
“Even in good conditions, photographing the moon is difficult because the atmosphere affects the quality of the final image, so I take about 2,000 pictures at each stage, of each part of the moon, and then rotate the telescope and repeat the previous stage,” McCarthy says. A complete picture of the moon is obtained.
Despite the relatively good conditions, there were still challenges to capturing a clear picture of the moon, so McCarthy took two photos of the entire moon to improve the clarity of poor quality and blurry parts. In the end, he took 280,000 photos to make Gigamon’s image.
Edited by Gigamon
“Since I used a monochrome camera to shoot the moon, I had to add color to the final image,” says McCarthy. For this purpose, I used a 12-inch telescope equipped with a full-frame CMOS camera. “Although this camera was monochrome, I used red, green, and blue filters to get high-quality color data for the final image.”
Collecting the data needed to create an image like GigaMoon is challenging. In addition, making the final image by combining thousands of photos is a task that requires a computer with very high processing power.
“Using the software, I crunched the pixel data to create the final image, which took several days,” explains McCarthy. Then, using Photoshop, I applied the angle of the photos and other adjustments.”
According to Petapixel, a few days after assembling the Gigamon image, McCarthy had to re-split the idea to make adjustments such as contrast, color saturation, etc., which most photographers are familiar with, to solve the problem of lack of memory on his computer . to be
“Generally, last week when I did some fairly small final edits on Gigamon, the image was split up and reassembled so that it looked flawless when zoomed in,” says McCarthy.
According to McCarthy, his computer crashed several times while making the GigaMoon image. To view this creative photographer’s entire 1.3 gigapixel image, you can visit the EasyZoom website.
McCarthy’s other works are also available on his Instagram, Twitter, and website.
