Few things are as photographed as the moon, our satellite, visible from anywhere on the globe, admired around the world for thousands of years.
Many of these photographs do not go beyond a white disc out of focus, since it is not easy to take a decent photo from the surface of the Earth, and less so with mobile cameras. Yes, there are exceptions, such as the cameras of the Huawei P30 and P40, for example, which have an impressive zoom, or those of many Samsung models, but the Moon is not made to be captured by a mobile.
On the other hand, if we put a reflex hooked to a telescope, or have a telescope synchronized with an app, we can take really spectacular photos, and the collection that I show you here is a clear example of the subject.
Let’s see what are the five most impressive photos of the Moon:
– The one posted by @cosmic.speck on Instagram, a 174-meg photo that can be seen in all its glory on reddit.com. We can zoom in on this marvel until we can see the craters up close, since it is made with more than 200,000 individual photographs.
Take a look at the photo of Andrew McCarthy and Connor Matherne:
– The one by Andrew McCarthy in 2020, a photograph created with 140,000 photos using CCD cameras (ZWO ASI 224MC, to group the stars and the outer brightness) and Sony a7ii (for the details of the illuminated part of the Moon). To make it possible, he linked the cameras with an Orion XT10 telescope with a special Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro mount.
– The NASA mosaic. NASA published in 2014 a high-resolution mosaic of the moon’s north pole using 10,581 images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) over four years. The image is 680 gigapixels and covers 2.54 million square kilometers. The spatial image has a resolution of two meters per pixeland the compressed image is 950 Gigabytes in size.
You can see it at lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/gigapan.
– The 24,000 pixel photo of 2014. A square mosaic made over two weeks in December 2010 from 1,300 black and white frames. The image run was timed to keep the Sun high in the lunar sky, but not directly overhead (its altitude ranged from 69° to 82°). This created enough shadows to define the rims of craters and other topography sharply. The image looks dark because, effectively, that’s what the moon is like, dark. The lunar surface reflects only about 12% of the sunlight that falls on it.
You can see it at gigapan.com.
– 50,000 photos to make the one published on reddit in 2019, a wonder of 81 megabytes also by Andrew McCarthy, with colors and shadows that take your breath away.
