Pune boy stitches 50,000 pics for ‘clearest picture’ of moon, netizens stunned

Pic Courtesy (L-R): Instagram-ANI

New Delhi: A 16-year-old boy from Pune, Maharashtra has captured one of the clearest pictures of the moon. Needless to say, the picture has gained him overnight fame. 

Prathamesh Jaju clicked over 50,000 images and stitched them together to get his “most detailed and clearest shot of the third quarter Mineral Moon”. 

Revealing his process of how he captured the pictures, in an interview with news agency ANI, Jaju said, "I captured the image on May 3 at 1 am. I captured for around four hours with videos and images. It took 38-40 hours for processing. The reason behind 50,000 pictures was to get the clearest picture of the moon. I stitched them together and sharpened the image to see crisp details of the moon. The raw data was 100 GB and after processing it, the data turned bigger so it was around 186 GB. When I stitched them together, the final file was around 600 MB." 

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A post shared by Prathamesh Jaju (@prathameshjaju)

As per IANS report, he used Celestron 5 Cassegrain OTA with EQ3-2 GO-TO Mount, ZWO ASI120MCS, GSO 2X BARLOW to click the images which beautifully define the lunar surface and its craters. The three-dimensional shot is an HDR Composite of two different images. 

Jaju, a student of Class 10, shared his inspiration for the project. "I read some articles and saw some YouTube videos to learn how to capture these images. I learned the processing,” he told ANI. 

Jaju aspires to become an astrophysicist and study astronomy professionally. He added astrophotography is ‘just a hobby’ for now.  

(With inputs from agencies)