Beautiful composite shot of Moon

October 10, 2024 9:53 PM

An Enormous Photo of the Moon Zooms in on the Cratered Lunar Topography in Incredible Detail From Colossal: Following four days of continuous observation, Darya Kawa Mirza captured the moon and its rugged surface in exceptional detail. The self-taught Kurdish astrophotographer amassed 81,000 images, which he stitched into a 708-gigabyte composite revealing the intricacies of the lunar topography in stunningly high resolution.
posted by aleph (10 comments total)

Amazing picture -and literally taken in the photographer's back yard (albeit with years worth of taught technique and laborious stitching). If you are British and a certain age then you might consider that it needs an Oliver Postgate voice over.
posted by rongorongo at 10:49 PM on October 10 [3 favorites]

They were discussing it at HN and one commenter had a further link:

[snip]
I found this article[0] that shows the gear he used for the images discussed within, but that was from 2022. He used a Celestron NexStar 8SE with a Canon EOS 1200D.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/stunning-detailed-image-of-moon-captured-by-astrophotographer-leaves-internet-mesmerised-3412219
posted by aleph at 10:54 PM on October 10 [1 favorite]

Beautiful lunacy. Thanks for this post.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:33 AM on October 11

The pockmarkedness of the moon makes me grateful for our atmosphere and magnetosphere.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:12 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]

Beautiful lunacy

Thanks for the poetry!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:39 AM on October 11

Our spheres are great, but isn't the difference mostly that we peel off our pockmarks with erosion and cover them up with vegetation in the meantime, or maybe an Ocean?
posted by Ashenmote at 7:02 AM on October 11

Yep (to Ashenmote's question).

The level of amateur space photography is just amazing given how accessible the hardware is these days. There's another photograph I watch on social media, Andrew McCarthy, and he takes pretty amazing photos of the sky.
posted by Atreides at 7:57 AM on October 11 [2 favorites]

I wish I could give this image to the people at Ripstop By The Roll to have printed onto nice, durable fabric, for making into sweet blankets.🌕
posted by wenestvedt at 7:58 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]

So did anyone find the full resolution image? I don’t know if I just didn’t follow all possible links but I am getting a bit of a clickbait vibe. His instant gram mentions that the full-resolution will be available eventually.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 5:47 PM on October 11 [2 favorites]

i too looked for the real thing and found nothing

also appreciate the effort but enough with the false colors, this ain't weather radar
posted by glonous keming at 11:53 AM on October 12 [2 favorites]