A 16-year-old boy from Pune shared the clearest pictures of the last quarter mineral Moon. He said that it took him nearly 40 hours to process the 50,000 photos he had clicked and to give the final 3-dimensional version of the celestial body.
Describing himself as an amateur astronomer, Prathamesh Jaju said that he learnt the craft of stitching together a number of images by watching YouTube videos.
Prathamesh aspires to be an astrophysicist and study the universe.
Jaju said the reason behind clicking so many photographs of the Moon was to get its most detailed view.
Explaining how he created the stunning photo, Jaju explained, “Raw data was 100GB. When you process it, the data gets bigger. So, it was around 186GB. When I stitched them together, the final file was around 600MB.”
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Jaju used a technique called ‘image compositing’ to combine the visual elements from those thousands of photographs into a single image.
Further he added, “The image is an HDR composite of two different images made to give it a 3-dimensional effect. This is my most detailed and clearest shot of the third quarter mineral moon.”
Jaju captured the image on May 3 at 1 am. He said that it took 38 to 40 hours for processing and the reason behind taking 50,000 pictures was to get the clearest picture of the Moon.
He said that at one point he feared that processing such huge data would kill his laptop.
He even had to downgrade the final image for viewing on mobile devices as the final image was 600 MB.
He had posted the image of the mineral moon on his Instagram account. The image clearly shows the lunar craters. The brown and bluish-grey tones of the Moon depict the different mineral compositions on the lunar surface.
