The Pin
May 05 2020, 3:47 pm
Californian astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy is always looking for a way to stand out with his work, and his most recent photograph, titled All Terminator, is no exception. McCarthy spent weeks on an unparalleled new astronomical image. Thanks to their dedication, each crater of the Moon is portrayed in all its splendor.
To get the perfect balance of light and shadow, McCarthy spent two weeks photographing the crescent moon. The images were then cut and stitched together to bring a single but powerful photograph of the Moon to life. However, to get his creative vision – an image where it was possible to see the texture of the entire lunar surface – the photographer had to be very patient.
McCarthy photographed the Moon for two weeks to get enough portions of Moon Terminator to get the texture he wanted. But what is a lunar terminator and why is it so important? We are all familiar with images of the Moon with one half illuminated and the other half in darkness. The lunar terminator is the area of division between light and dark, and within this zone, details such as craters are much easier to see. The reason the Moon’s surface is more visually “readable” in this area is because of shadows: as the Sun gets closer to the horizon at the terminator, its light causes longer shadows, which give it the surface its three-dimensional appearance.
“I take as many photos as possible, with two cameras and a telescope attached to a positional mouse that compensates for the Earth’s rotation,” Andrew explained to the Daily Mail.
With this in mind, McCarthy was tenacious enough to immerse himself in this project — not an easy task considering that the Moon changes position slightly every day. To stitch together the 12 photos used in the final image, the astrophotographer mapped the individual photos onto a sphere and manually adjusted them. Although McCarthy describes this process as “exhausting,” the truth is that his efforts paid off.
Andrew McCarthy is an amateur photographer of the cosmos or “space nerd”, as he calls himself on his Instagram account, he has a passion for astronomy thanks to his father, who showed him the moon through a telescope When I was a kid.
Andrew, who lives in Sacramento, California, and works in software technology, has taken hundreds of thousands of photographs.
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