'50,000 photos, 40 hours': How 16-year-old boy captured 'clearest' moon pic
A 16-year-old claims to have captured the "clearest" picture of the last quarter mineral Moon. It took him nearly 40 hours to process about 50,000 photos. Pune-based Prathamesh Jaju, who became an internet sensation after his picture went viral, calls himself an "amateur astronomer".
Speaking to news agency ANI, Prathamesh said that he captured the image on May 3 at 1 am. "I captured for around 4 hours with videos and images. It took 38-40 hours for processing. The reason behind 50,000 pictures was to get clearest picture of moon. I stitched them together and sharpened image to see crisp details of moon," he said.
Prathamesh wishes to take up astronomy professionally. "I read some articles and saw some YouTube videos and learned information about processing and how to capture these images. I want to become an astrophysicist and study astronomy professionally but astrophotography is just a hobby for me right now," Jaju said.
The image clicked by the young boy is an HDR Composite of two different images made to give it a three-dimensional effect. "This is my most detailed and clearest shot of the third quarter mineral moon," he said.
"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," Prathamesh further explained.
The boy had posted the image of the mineral moon on his Instagram account. The photo clearly shows the lunar craters while the brown and bluish-grey tones of the moon depict different mineral compositions on the lunar surface.
READ MORE: Super Blood Moon 2021: How biggest total lunar eclipse of the year will look like in India
