If you like very detailed photos of the beauties of space, you will spend a lot of time looking at the high resolution photo that the American astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy released this week on his social networks. After taking a 174 MP photo of the Moon, he has now managed to get an even bigger one at 183 MP.
Naturally, to get the amount of detail we can see in the photo, he didn’t use a high-end smartphone or some professional camera, but an 11-inch telescope on an equatorial mount — a system that requires two axes, one ground, and one another secondary that allows movement from 0º at the Equator.
The show, which took about 45 minutes to register, overlay 180,000 16-bit images, and over 600GB of data.
McCarthy has also distinguished himself by capturing beautiful images of the Sun and Mars rising from behind the Moon, in addition to the Pillars of Creation, which he managed to record with his low-cost telescopes. His works were even gathered in the documentary Moon Shot, available on YouTube.
Despite everything, the astrophotographer commented on social networks on his impressions of the record. “I’m not very happy with the result of this one due to changing viewing conditions. The atmosphere was stable for the first half of the photo, but conditions deteriorated during the capture process.”
Even so, he decided to make the image public so that more people have access to the material, in addition to technical minutiae on his part.