When it comes to Astrophotographers, few have the name recognition that Andrew McCarthy has. For years the ridiculously high detailed photos of planets and the moon, produced from his backyard, allowed all of us the ability to view our universe in ways we never had before.
Being able to zoom in on a specific crater, reference it to other scientific records or data while still having a ‘beautiful’ image is giving both scientists and those simply interested in the moon a whole new perspective.
Well – Andrew McCarthy Is At It Again
This time – with an 85-megapixel image of the moon that could literally be analyzed for hours in amazing detail.
All this came from one man, his backyard, a bit of high end equipment, patience and skill.
The image – well, 24,000 images – were taken over a 45 minute time span and then only the bets images were chosen to be stitched together into this 85-megapixel image.
“I use a special camera designed for very high frame rates, so I can take hundreds of thousands of shots in minutes… Processing is a bit longer, just because it’s so much data. I use software that I upload the RAW frames into that aligns and stacks it, spitting out stacked files that I stitch together in Photoshop. I also run various sharpening programs on the data, and since the stacked images are so high quality, I can get crisp details from sharpening without producing noise and artifacts. Processing started late in the evening and ran all the way until I shared the image around 3 pm the following day.”My Modern Met – Interview with Andrew McCarthy
We highly recommend you check out his Patreon as these and my other images are for sale in digital and print version.
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