Clearest photograph of moon captured by Pune based Prathamesh Jaju
Renuka Suryavanshi
A Prabhat road resident has been an amateur astronomy enthusiast, who was eagerly looking forward to capturing the moon’s picture for a long time. But his board examinations this year always made it a distant dream. But, thanks to the cancellation of Class X examinations this year, his dream finally came true on May 3, when he finally got the chance to click the picture.
[ad id=’7665′]
Speaking about the rare incident, he said, since childhood I was fascinated about the stars, planets and space. The interest grew when I joined Jyotirvidya Parisanstha about three years ago. To capture this picture, I spent around 5 hours and clicked around 50,000 images and shot 38 videos. I used JVP’s telescope and shot every inch of the moon’s surface, as if I was taking a panoramic shot. Each of these videos had some 2000 frames. I shortlisted around 50,000 images and stitched together into one image. The moon’s colour shows variations in the shades of orange and blue. The entire process of bringing these pictures together took about 40 hours.
Prathamesh Jaju while speaking about his interest in astronomy told that the interest in space grew after he watched Star Wars and some similar space based movies. He, a student of Pune based Jyotirvidya Parisanstha student now plans to focus on learning astro – photography.
In his instagram post about the Mineral Moon’s photograph, he said, “This image is an HDR Composite of two different images made to give it a 3 dimensional effect. This is my most detailed and clearest shot of the third quarter Mineral Moon. I captured around 50,000+ images over 186 GigaBytes of Data which almost killed my laptop with the processing. I captured around 38 panels at 1500 and 3000mm Focal Length with a 1.2 megapixel ZWO ASI120MC-S which made this image almost 50 megapixels huge. “
Equipment used : ▪️Celestron 5 Cassegrain OTA.
▪️ZWO ASI120MC-S
▪️ SkyWatcher EQ3-2 GO-TO.
▪️GSO 2X BARLOW
(Which allowed me to shot at 3 metres of Focal Length)
