Zoom in as far as you can!!

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This image is actually the byproduct of a much larger project I'm working on, but since the rest of the project won't be finished until next weekend I thought I'd share the most crystal-clear image of the moon I've ever taken in the meantime. Little specks in this image are mile-wide mountains and boulders!

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This image was created using a combination of shots from 2 different cameras, one to capture color, stars, and (some) earthshine, and one to capture the surface details and textures on 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. Different atmopsheric conditions means some shots were better than others, so a lot of repitition was necessary to get the best possible image.

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For more of this kind of thing, come find me on instagram @cosmic_background. I share more details about how I acquire my moon pictures in my stories pinned to my profile, and do live updates as I work on projects. Feel free to DM me if you ever want to chat about astronomy/astrophotography/equipment or anything else. Most of my shots are taken from my backyard in Sacramento, California.

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Equipment:

Orion XT10

Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro

ZWO ASI224MC

Sony a7ii

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Process:

Acquired around 500 tiles with the ZWO camera, and each tile was 2000 images (around 1,000,000 images, give or take a few thousand). I took around 2500 shots with the sony, over around 24 tiles. I also took a few hundred shots with a 300mm lens to capture some stars around the moon. All these images were stacked in autostakkert, then stitched together and adjusted in photoshop until I was happy with the composition.

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You have my blessing to use this as a wallpaper if you like it. If you want it for any other use DM me.

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Downloadable Link

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Original 400 Megapixel image I posted to r/space

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Miscellaneous fun facts about this image:

• This was shot over a period of 6 hours on Thursday night.
• This took over a terabyte of data.
• It took two full days before my computer finished stacking everything and I could finish assembling the composition in photoshop... (actually 2 computers were working non-stop on this)
• The photoshop file reached a peak of 24GB while working on this, despite constantly flattening/ trimming as I went.
• The first time I saved the master stack of images, my computer was working so hard I blew a circuit breaker in my house.. didn't even know that was possible!
• This is actually downscaled- if I had processed everything in maximum sizes, the image would have been 40k x 40k pixels- 1.6 Gigapixels!