California astrophotographer creates colorful Moon image using pieces of 150,000 photos
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An astrophotographer in Sacramento, Calif., took advantage of the February supermoon to create a stunning image. (iStock)
An astrophotographer in Sacramento, California, took advantage of the February supermoon to create a stunning image.
Andrew McCarthy extracted “color data” from 150,000 images he took of Moon on Feb. 19 — the day of the supermoon — to create a colorful 81-megapixel photo, according to Business Insider.
McCarthy explained on Reddit that he “stripped the albedo and bumped up the saturation, and ended up with a mineral ‘map’ of the Moon.”
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30-MILLION-PAGE ARCHIVE OF HUMANITY'S ACHIEVEMENTS HEADED TO THE MOON
“If you look closely near craters, you can see how the impacts add new minerals to the surface, which reflect back different colors,” he described.
“I took the color data from my supermoon picture and embellished it,” he added on Instagram. “You can see where each impact ‘paints’ a new splash of color on the surface of the Moon.”
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Responding to one comment, McCarthy — who works at a software company by day, according to Forbes — said the different colors seen in the photo “are due to different minerals in the rock."
"The blue areas are titanium-rich basalt and the orange areas are missing titanium and iron,” he wrote.
As of Thursday afternoon, the photo had more than 17,000 likes on the photo-sharing platform.
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“It looks like a moldy tortilla,” one Reddit user wrote.
“It almost looks like a plant covered with a city,” another observed.
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McCarthy told Forbes he spent a lot of time as a child looking through his father’s telescope.
"He showed me the planets and the Moon, and left me with a curiosity that has never been satisfied since,” he said. “I spend my nights outside in awe at the wonders above us, and have only scratched the surface of what I want to be able to see an image."
Andrew McCarthy did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for additional comment Thursday afternoon.