Science / 16-year-old Indian boy captures 'clearest' pic of Moon, photo goes viral

Pune: A teenager from Pune gained popularity on social media by capturing one of the clearest pictures of the moon.

Prathamesh Jaju, a 16-year-old boy from Pune, shot around 50,000 pictures and stitched them together to get the clearest and sharpest image of the moon. It took him around 40 hours to process the images and videos.

Speaking to ANI, Jaju said, "I captured the image on May 3 at 1 am. I captured for around four hours with videos and images. It took 38-40 hours for processing. The reason behind 50,000 pictures was to get the clearest picture of the moon. I stitched them together and sharpened the image to see crisp details of the moon. The raw data was 100 GB and after processing it, the data turned bigger so it was around 186 GB. When I stitched them together, the final file was around 600 MB."

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A post shared by Prathamesh Jaju (@prathameshjaju)

Asked about how he got the idea to do such a thing, the teenager said, "I read some articles and saw some YouTube videos to learn how to capture these images. I learned the processing."

Jaju is a student of Class 10 in Vidya Bhavan School, Pune. His father runs a computer sales and repairing business while his mother is a housewife. Besides photography, Jaju likes athletics. He even participated in one national competition in athletics. He is also very active on social media and has more than 26,500 followers on Instagram.

Sharing about his future aspirations, the teenager said, "I want to become an astrophysicist and study astronomy professionally but astrophotography is just a hobby for me right now."

Jaju shared his images of the moon on social media platforms like Instagram that have over 11,000 likes.

"This image is an HDR Composite of two different images made to give it a three-dimensional effect. This is my most detailed and clearest shot of the third quarter Mineral Moon," he said.

"Our eyes cannot resolute the colours of the minerals on the moon. The blue tones reveal areas rich in ilmenite which contains iron, titanium and oxygen. While the orange and purple colours show regions relatively poor in titanium and iron. The white/grey tomes refer to areas of greater exposure to sunlight," Jaju wrote on social media while describing his captured image of the moon.