Over The Years I Have Taken A Few Pictures Of The Moon,

I guess we all have at some stage in our lives,

 but the number of times I have taken it's picture pale into insignificance compared to the 50,000 individual images of the night sky that photographer Andrew McCarthy has done and transformed them into one very large and detailed photo of the moon,

 every crater and lunar mare on the “light” side looks like it was shot from within the natural satellite’s orbit, when the image was actually created from a telescope and two camera setup 239,000 miles away in Sacramento, California,

His process involves focusing and refocusing on bright stars, taking photos in stacks at different exposure lengths, and switching between an astronomy camera and a Sony a7 II with a 300mm lens, He then loads the stacks into Photoshop and uses special software (and a manual process of duplicating, flipping, subtracting, and editing) to align and adjust the images to create the final product, to order prints of this or any of Andrew McCarthy’s astrophotography, visit his online store, what stunning detail the photographs of the moon he has in his pictures.