21/08/2024
A 16-YEAR-OLD BOY SHAKES NASA WITH STUNNING IMAGES OF THE MOON
An incredibly detailed image of the Moon was compiled by an Indian teenager, who captured 55,000 photographs — accumulating more than 186 gigabytes on his laptop in the process — to obtain a pastache of celestial proportions.
Prathamesh Jaju, 16, from Pune, Maharashtra, shared his HDR image of a waning crescent moon on Instagram. He admitted that compiling so many photos for his most detailed and sharp image to date tested his technology. "The laptop almost killed me with the processing," he said.
The amateur astrophotographer began the project by filming several videos of different small sections of the Moon in the early hours of May 3. Each video contains about 2000 frames; the trick was to merge and stacking the videos to create a single image, while overlapping them to generate a three-dimensional effect.
"So I took about 38 videos," Jaju explained, according to News 18. "We now have 38 images." "We focus each of them manually and then photoshop them together, like a huge tile."
Jaju told ANI on Twitter that he learned to capture and process those composite images with web articles and YouTube videos. After some touch-ups, the nearly 40-hour processing resulted in an impressive composition of the Moon with magnificent details, rich texture and an amazing range of colors.
Colors, Jaju said, are a fascinating phenomenon. They represent the minerals of the Moon that DSLR cameras can distinguish with greater clarity than the human eye.
"The blue tones reveal areas rich in ilmenite, which contains iron, titanium and oxygen," he said. """While the colors orange and purple show relatively poor regions in titanium and iron.""" White and gray tones indicate areas exposed to more sunlight.
The teenager shared with his tech-savvy followers on Instagram the specifications of his telescope, high-speed USB camera, tripod and lenses, as well as the software he used to capture the images.
Thousands of viewers were impressed by the composite image Jaju obtained.
"Bravo! "It's a beautiful job, aesthetically, astronomically and technologically," said an Instagram user.
"Hats off to you for capturing something so elegant!" ", he wrote another. "This image cannot be properly quantified in any way and should go down in history as the best image of the Moon ever captured from Earth."
In the future, Jaju hopes to become a professional astrophysicist.
