Photo credit: Andrew McCarthy
Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy used two high-powered telescopes to capture over 280,000 individual photos of the Moon and stitched them together to create a stunning 1.3-gigapixel mosaic, called ‘GigaMoon’. It took him 2-weeks to shoot using an 11-inch telescope with a 2.5x powermate, which allowed him to peer through the hazy atmospheric layers we can’t see from the ground.
The second telescope he used was a 12-inch Newtonian equipped with a full-frame CMOS camera. Despite being a monochrome camera, it has a filter wheel that enabled him to cycle through red, green and blue colors to capture the high-quality image data that was added to the final image. Software was then used to interpolate data between the pixels to produce an upscaled image from the stack over several days.
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Even with good conditions, it’s almost like capturing through water with how much the atmosphere distorts each image. For that reason, I capture about 2,000 images at a time. Doing this on each section, then slewing my telescope and doing it again and again eventually covering the full moon is how these images are captured,” said McCarthy to PetaPixel.
