Two astrophotographers have just released what they claim is “the most insanely detailed picture” of the Moon, the product of a two-year, neck-craning endeavor that took over 200,000 frames.
For millennia, humans have looked up and seen the same silver orb traversing the night sky – but never quite like this. As space photography enthusiast Andrew McCarthy says of his collaboration with planetary scientist Connor Matherne, “behold” this stunning image:
While looking at this 174-megapixel beauty, you can see the Moon, which is colored red and gunmetal blue and is lighted on the right side as it faces Earth. McCarthy stated on Twitter that the red areas are iron and feldspar oxidized by wayward oxygen atoms from Earth.
Though the colors appear to be artificial, they are technically the Moon’s genuine hues; our eyes are simply not sensitive enough to see them, so McCarthy enhanced the image with saturation to bring out the colors in all their splendor.
McCarthy’s expertise is detailed photography, which he uses to record every nook, crook, and crater on the lunar surface. Matherne, a planetary scientist and deep space photographer based in Louisiana, is also responsible for the color.
The masterpiece was created using over 200,000 photos collected over the course of a single evening and piled together.
