Pune, May 20 (IndiaToday) – A 16-year-old boy from Pune in Maharashtra has gone viral on social media for capturing one of the most beautiful and detailed 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.
16-YEAR-OLD BOY CAPTURES PICTURE OF MOON BY PROCESSING 50,000 IMAGES
Prathamesh Jaju, who calls himself an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer, is the man behind the viral images. According to him, this is his most detailed and clearest shot of the third quarter Mineral Moon.
Calling the shot Last Quarter Mineral HDR Moon Composite, the boy in an Instagram post revealed that he “captured around 38 panels at 1500 and 3000mm Focal Length with a 1.2megapixel ZWO ASI120MC-S which made the image almost 50 megapixels huge.”
Take a look at the pictures shared by Jaju: https://www.instagram.com/p/COiTQQSJZy8/
In an interview with ANI, Jaju talked about his process of taking the picture. He revealed that the image is an HDR composite of two different images. This was done to give it a 3-dimensional effect. “This is my most detailed and clearest shot of the third quarter Mineral Moon,” he said.
He added, “Raw data was 100GB and when you process it the data gets bigger, so it was around 186GB. When I stitched them together, the final file was around 600MB. I captured the image on May 3 at 1am. I captured for around 4 hrs with videos and images. It took 38-40 hrs to process. The reason behind 50,000 pictures was to get the clearest picture of the Moon. I stitched them together and sharpened the image to see crisp details of the Moon.”
According to Pratham, he first read articles and watched some YouTube videos to gather information about processing and ways to capture these images. “I want to become an astrophysicist and study astronomy professionally but astrophotography is just a hobby for me right now,” he told ANI.
