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I took 50k images of the night sky to make an 81 Megapixel image of the moon

873 points| sohkamyung | 7 years ago |reddit.com

113 comments

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[+] m-p-3|7 years ago|reply
Becausr the full-res version links went down often yesterday, I'm hosting it on my IPFS node, here's the link (for those on IPFS, if you can afford the bandwidth please pin it to spread the load :) ) https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVLTMHtLRhnft3QspDx4qTJeXY6hiib1j77UfQ...

Also made it available in torrent form (with the IPFS URL as a web seed) http://www.urlhash.com/124410/mosaic.png.torrent

[+] Rooster61|7 years ago|reply
As an amateur astronomer who has looked directly at the moon through a telescope hundreds of times, this photo looks strange and artificial, though I know it's not. I pondered why this was for a bit, and came to the conclusion that its otherworldly quality is actually due to being superior to what one can see directly. At any one moment, direct observation will have artifacts of the air moving between you and the target object. This picture quashes all of that at once, lending an "uncanny valley" feeling I think spurred by the fact that my brain just isn't used to that level of fidelity looking at a real object. This work is fantastic.
[+] madaxe_again|7 years ago|reply
No no, it is strange and artificial. The stars are comped in from something else, and the moonglow looks like a gaussian blur. Still, it's pretty, and has hopefully inspired people to go stare at the moon.

To be fair, most astrophotography is "enhanced" one way or another - I can spend hours screwing around with a single DSO shot after stacking.

Here's a quick and dirty 30 second reconstruction using a shot of the moon from last summer, acquired in much the same way as OP - except using an EdgeHD 14 with an EOS 7D in video mode. It's pretty crap as last year was my first foray into planetary imaging - I usually do DSOs.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hYLJeb_pO9z2qNFwtux0q5Jix9D...

[+] k4r1|7 years ago|reply
All the download links are down at the moment. Here's a torrent link:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:j6ixrzpitvpmkx5tgroy6utcpqr5hhhj&dn=updated%20mosaic.png&xl=304863698&fc=1

[+] microcolonel|7 years ago|reply
PSA: Update your Transmission. A good chunk of you are running 2.92, which is susceptible to CVE-2018-5702[0] (which allows basically anyone to write arbitrary files to your computer from a webpage).

Also, cool trackerless magnet link, worked a treat.

[0]: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-5702

[+] PuffinBlue|7 years ago|reply
There's a 4k wallpaper version. 213MB. Moon centered in the screen.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:6f64830246540020bf26b87b5c269088d563ac5d&dn=4K-mosaic.png

[+] rietta|7 years ago|reply
Thanks! And now I'm sharing back out as well.
[+] nbeleski|7 years ago|reply
thanks for this! It is probably a smarter way to share the pic given the number o dead links...
[+] ptero|7 years ago|reply
This is great; as another pointer, http://clarkvision.com is my go-to source for beautiful astrophotography with technical explanations. Look for astro gallery and tutorials if interested
[+] KnightOfWords|7 years ago|reply
A quick word of caution. For anyone who might be interested in astrophotography I really wouldn't recommend any of the tutorials on the clark-vision site. This is what the co-author of an astronomical image processing program had to say about them: http://forum.startools.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=912

"The "articles" exhibit a litany of errors, nonsense and misunderstandings of how some basic algorithms and mathematical concepts work in image processing, including (but sadly not limited to) light pollution removal, deconvolution, the commutative property in mathematics, stacking, linearity vs non-linearity of data, basic physics and color theory.

After politely inquiring why he thought any of this was good practice or scientifically accurate and getting nowhere, even after demonstrating the mathematics and writing code to disprove some of his more fanciful claims and pointing out errors and untruths. The fact that I'm having to put this warning up, gives you an indication that that didn't go very well."

[+] ourmandave|7 years ago|reply
The image is 9000 x 9000 pixels.

Future proofing for my own-it-someday 8K monitor background.

[+] LeonM|7 years ago|reply
I tried opening the image, but it made my entire laptop unresponsive[1]. So let's hope the graphics manufacturers catch up with the pixel trent before those 8K monitors become mainstream.

[1] On Chrome for MacOS. Granted my macbook is a couple years old, and the Apple graphics drivers are garbage.

[+] Tomte|7 years ago|reply
By then your eyesight might have deteriorated. ;-)
[+] Waterluvian|7 years ago|reply
Is it just me or are 4k monitors running in 1080p worse than straight 1080p monitors?
[+] aboutruby|7 years ago|reply
Pretty much every download link is down, but the torrent is working: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:j6ixrzpitvpmkx5tgroy6utcpqr5hhhj&dn=updated%20mosaic.png&xl=304863698&fc=1
[+] gppk|7 years ago|reply
~~I obviously don't know enough about images... Why would you store this as a jpg and not a LOSELESS format?~~

The full resolution image is in the comments, it's uploaded small because of Reddit

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lGDV6jOHc0v5UdkxcqYShqhKBz_...

[+] aerophilic|7 years ago|reply
Assuming “lossless”, the main reason is you don’t want to “lose” information. For example, if someone wanted to actually use this picture to geo-reference (or would it be Lunar-reference =p) a particular reference a particular feature, you would want it to be accurate. Specific use case: you found some ice, and want to know exactly where it was, as well as composition. If you didn’t use a lossless format, you wouldn’t have confidence it wasn’t as artifact of the compression.

Edit: misstated Leo instead of lunar, Leo is low earth orbit

[+] squarefoot|7 years ago|reply
This is so beautiful, thanks! I'll cut some pieces to be used as desktop backgrounds. The southern part of the moon and surrounding space if turned upside down would make a really nice one. BTW, I spent some time zooming around the stars and objects and some of them look rather interesting, at least to a completely astronomy illiterate like me, such as the closest objects to the moon at roughly 2 o' clock.
[+] faitswulff|7 years ago|reply
Anyone have a mirror of the full-size lossless image? All the download links are dead atm.
[+] Theodores|7 years ago|reply
If anyone wants to look at this image properly then you need OpenSeadragon and VIPS.

OpenSeadragon enables you to view this image at full resolution without your device keeling over, VIPS enables you to make the image tiles required to get OpenSeadragon to work.

OpenSeadragon has only ever made it to the academic world, in this age of Instagram people want average resolution selfies that take three seconds to look at. OpenSeadragon enables a deeper look.

If anyone has ten minutes spare:

https://openseadragon.github.io/

On linux just apt-get install vips and then:

vips dzsave massive.jpg massive

And you are then good to go.

Now where was that torrent link...?

[+] enriquto|7 years ago|reply
For images of a moderate size such as this one, viewing it on a regular image viewer is less of a hassle.
[+] phront|7 years ago|reply
Great!

It is interesting, why Google or anybody else have not made a map of Moon just like Googlemap of Earth. Are there some technical problems?

[+] dylan604|7 years ago|reply
Tangentially, I recently was using Google Earth, and zoomed all the way out so that the background stars, Milky Way, etc could be seen. Anyone know how accurate that scaling is of the background relative to Earth is? What caught my eye was the scale of Orion.
[+] diegoperini|7 years ago|reply
Windows Photos is having a hard time despite my strong specs. Any alternative to use aside from browsers?
[+] WalterSobchak|7 years ago|reply
I've tried most alternatives for Windows, and the best I've found is Nomacs[1]. It's very fast and customizable.

1.) https://nomacs.org

nomacs is a free, open source image viewer, which supports multiple platforms. You can use it for viewing all common image formats including RAW and psd images.

[+] scarejunba|7 years ago|reply
What’s the glow over the lit part? There shouldn’t be any dust or air to provide it there, right?
[+] philcarbo|7 years ago|reply
This is amazing! Definitely my new wallpaper... on all my computers. :)
[+] omilu|7 years ago|reply
Is the haze around the moon sun light scattering because of moon dust?
[+] jcurbo|7 years ago|reply
No, it's partially artistic, partially light scattering in the Earth's atmosphere from the moonlight and the exposure settings he used. The moon does have a very tenuous atmosphere but nothing thick enough to cause this effect.
[+] Sharlin|7 years ago|reply
No. This photo (well, photos) is taken from the bottom of an air sea, which is where the scattering happens.
[+] mankyd|7 years ago|reply
Not sure, but that's unlikely. Remember, the moon has no atmosphere, so there's nothing really to either kick-up nor suspend the dust in.

Any dust that did get kicked up (by meteorites?) would settle back down relatively quickly.

[+] fergie|7 years ago|reply
Is the resolution high enough to see any man made stuff?
[+] MrEldritch|7 years ago|reply
Not even close. (81 megapixels is 9000 by 9000, and the moon only takes up about the middle 1/9th of the image, so it's about 3000 pixels across. So that's over a km per pixel at the very front of the moon, and even worse at the edges where the surface is at an oblique angle to our view)