After four days of continuous observation, Darya Kawa Mirza captured the moon and its rugged surface in exceptional detail.
The self-taught Kurdish astrophotographer collected 81,000 images, which he stitched together into a 708 gigabyte composite, revealing the complexity of the moon’s topography in stunningly high resolution. Each frame zooms in on both individual craters and bruises – a combination of asteroid and comet impacts. deposits left behind by volcanic eruptions– allowing a close-up study of the sphere that illuminates our night sky.
Mirza started taking photographs in 2007 and has slowly developed his techniques, now using a powerful telescope attached to a pair of cameras set up in his backyard. For this composite, he wanted to create a mosaic that merged images of the moon in four different phases, which he calls “phase fusion.”
“This technique is so difficult and so painful because you have encountered the movement of the moon on its axis. You can’t just merge two moon phases because they don’t line up,” he tells Colossal.
Instead, Mirza stitches all the images together frame by frame, offering rare glimpses of both the unique celestial landscape and the shifts in light and shadow as the moon’s visibility changes over the course of a few days.
Next on Mirza’s agenda? Planets, galaxies and nebulae, all documented with impeccable precision. Until then, you can view more of his photos at Instagram.
