Pune: 16-year-old 'astronomy lover' clicks stunning pic of moon with 55,000 images

A 16-year-old boy from Pune, an amateur astronomer as per his Instagram bio, has captured a stunning image of the moon and left the internet mesmerized. Fond of planetary photography, the Indian boy has a massive collection of over 55,000 images, approximately 186 gigabytes. One of his moon images, with distinct features and details, is now appealing to the viewers for its extraordinary photographic perfection. Prathamesh Jaju took to Instagram to share the iconic imagery that he called his "most detailed and clearest shot and the best work of the third quarter Mineral Moon". He, in fact, shared several images of the moon clicked by him on his Instagram handle. He informed, that the recent image that he captured is an HDR Composite of two different images which are made to give it a 3-dimensional effect to the moon. 

“I captured around 38 panels at 1500 and 3000mm Focal Length with a 1.2-megapixel ZWO ASI120MC-S which made this image almost 50 megapixels huge, resolution downscaled for mobiles,” he wrote alongside the breathtaking image of the celestial body.

The teenage boy, who has flair for astronomy, has also captured Uranus with JVP's C11 Edge HD with a ZWO ASI120MCs planetary imaging camera. His audience admired his photographic skills calling the images “flawless,” and “an amazing achievement.” In one of the posts, the boy explains, “We sharpen each one of them [planetary images] manually and then stitch them together in Photoshop like a big mosaic. Once the mosaic is done, some more adjustments are made and some final touch-ups, and boom!”

Pune boy shares photographic techniques for 'moon shots'

For the detailed moon image that has amazed the astrophile, Jaju explained the photographic techniques saying that he used a SkyWatcher 8” Collapsible Reflector Dobsonian with a Canon EOS 90D (with an APS-C CMOS sensor) to bring out the shades. He continued that he refined the image on software like PIPP, Autostakkert, IMPPG, Registax 6, Adobe Photoshop, and Lightroom for detailed post-processing. “My laptop worked like a fine beast continuously working for a day and a half with the processing of this image,” he told his followers. he further explained that the image is an HDR Composite of two different images to bring out the perfect clarity in the image and do away the digital noise.