The Hunter super full moon occurred on the 17th October 2024
It was the brightest and largest moon of the entire year being 14% larger and 30% brighter then a normal full moon. This occurs when the moon is in perigee - the closest point to earth in its elliptical orbit
The Hunter name comes from it occurring when hunters would traditionally have been most active, the long bright light in the sky allowed the hunters to stalk prey at night
See The Details
hunter's supermoon
Read About The Process
CAPTURING
For the details of the Moon I used a designated astronomy camera with a telescope and a 2x Barlow lens to create 2650mm of focal length capturing in 4K quality
I then captured small sections / panels of the Moon in video, panning around until every section of the Moon was captured. This process is known as a 'Moon mosaic' it allows you to capture much greater details compared to capturing the whole Moon in a single frame. For each panel 2000 photos were captured
Snippet from one of the videos, the slight wobbling is due to the atmospheric conditions and the movement from right to left is due to the Earth's rotation
single frame
A single frame taken from the above video, some details can be made out however image is hazy especially towards the edges
Stacking + Sharpening
800 of the best quality frames stacked together into one single image and then sharpened. This process eliminates noise & haziness whilst increasing details & sharpness
"Moon Mosaic"
I repeated this process for all of the 39 tiles. To keep the exact details I wanted I manually aligned and stitched together the tiles to make the complete Moon
The image on the right is a stitch of 39 images in which 2000 images were captured for each panel ~ 80,000 photos together for the detailed Moon
Each square / rectangle is a different tile that has been aligned
Colours Of The MOon
Most people think of the Moon as being very monochrome however you can reveal some hidden vibrant colours
With just a regular dslr camera and telephoto lens I captured 40 photographs like the one to the right and then stacked them all together with each one the colours being more vibrant and strong
1 of the 40 photographs used for the colour
The colours are a result of different metal minerals found within the soil that aren't visible to the human eye
- Orange colours are from oxidised iron similar to rust
- Blue & purple colours are regions which contain higher amounts of titanium
backgrounds
I captured a longer exposure photograph which gives the effect of a soft glow coming from the Moon for the background
To give the background more depth I also used a long exposure photograph of the stars to blend in with the glow
