16-year-old Pune Boy Captures Stunning Photo of Moon with 55,000 Images

A Reddit image has recently come to the attention of netizens that appears to probably be one of the most detailed images of the Moon ever captured. Captured by 16-year-old Prathamesh Jaju from Pune, Maharashtra, the photo was created with 55,000 images comprising data of over 186 gigabytes.

In the comments on the post, Jaju explained how he was able to capture the stunning image. He said, “This is my most detailed and clearest shot and my best work 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."

He added, “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!"

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 added 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.

While the colour of the Moon seems to be unusual in the image, according to Jaju, the colours represent the minerals on the moon, which our eyes can’t resolve but DSLR cameras and other specific cameras.