Moon is a celestial object that truly shows how blemishes and scars can also be beautiful and breathtaking. We¡¯ve seen various astronomers and telescopes capture the grey satellite that revolves around our planet, and every week we see its new facet.?
We have images seem images captured from the moon, from the International Space Station and of course, from Earth. However, this version of the Moon captured by Indian Reddit user KrishnaForever is breathtaking on a whole new level.?
The image shows moon with its craters and all while the right side is illuminated like a semi-circle halo on a dark starry background.?
Krishna explained the lunar phenomenon in one of his comments on the forum, ¡°Moonshine is something that happens when the rays of sun after its set hit out oceans in an angle which directs it towards the moon and during certain phase of the moon you can witness it, its usually during 3rd to 5th days of a waxing moon phase and I shot the moonshine on a 3rd day of a waxing moon, and then I shot the moon 3 days later when it was at 43% Illumination, and I merged all the data into one photo and that¡¯s it.¡±
And in case you were wondering how he got this one perfect shot of the moon, it¡¯s in fact a combination of 200 similar images. Captured on a Canon 200D entry-level camera paired with a 55-250mm kit lens -- both of which cost around Rs 55,000 to Rs 60,000 in total.
The images of the moon were captured in HDR and involved a very detailed editing process, according to the Reddit user.?
Krishna explained this in another comment, ¡°In terms of the editing process, I bring all my raws into an app called PIPP, it centres and crops my raws (Because the moon moves and I don¡¯t shoot on a tracker) and It exports all of them into tiffs and I take all the tiffs and manually stack them one by one in Photoshop, even tho there are many apps to do the stacking easily, I personally find manually stacking them pretty effective and after I have stacked them I took one of the moonshine shots which I shot overexposed and put it under my moon layer and added a layer of stars.¡±
This image is proof that astro-photography as a hobby is possible for anyone to engage in -- for which you don't necessarily need extremely expensive equipment. Happy star gazing!