50,000 photos of the moon

Two weeks ago, I posted the far side of the moon selfie taken from the Longjiang-2 satellite. This week, I came across another moon shot – this time taken from earth. Andrew McCarthy created the photo of the moon above by stitching and overlaying 50,000 photos. He writes:

“This image was created using a combination of shots from 2 different cameras, one to capture earthshine and stars, and one to capture the detail on the lit side of the moon. The shots were then stacked and pieced together for editing. I took so many shots to average out the blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence, as well as to eliminate noise captured by the camera sensor. A note to astrophotography purists: I did take some creative liberties with the composition to make up for areas with bad or incomplete data, so I would define this image as more of a composite than a true photograph.”

If you like this, he has an Instagram full of photos like this one. It’s great!

The full-resolution photo is 9,000 x 9,000 pixels or 81 megapixels (305 MB). The detail is just stunning. In case, the link is dead, try this one.