Moon in Bloom

About the piece

Captured using a telescope on 25 April 2026, Moon in Bloom presents the lunar surface during its Waxing Gibbous phase, when increasing sunlight reveals a brighter and more expansive view of the Moon.

The piece focuses on the Moon's brighter mineral colours — soft blues and purples from titanium rich regions, alongside warmer orange tones caused by iron oxides within the lunar soil. These natural colour variations are subtle to the human eye, but through stacking and processing they begin to emerge more clearly.

The final image is constructed from 36 separate panels, each created from 2,000 individual frames, combining 72,000 frames in total.

The title Moon in Bloom reflects this transformation: a familiar celestial body opening visually through light, colour, and detail, almost like a flower blooming in space.

Date of capture25 April 2026

Moon phaseWaxing Gibbous

Panels36

Frames72,000

Edition40

Resolution10,370 × 13,845 px

Process

Behind the image

The Equipment

A Celestron Nexstar 8SE telescope provides the focal length needed for high-resolution lunar detail, paired with a Player One Uranus-C astronomy camera for the monochrome panel captures and a Nikon D750 DSLR for the mineral colour photography.

Astronomy camera

Telescope

Capturing the Panels

The Moon is divided into sections and each is recorded as high-resolution monochrome video through the telescope. The mount tracks the Moon across the sky while thousands of frames are recorded per panel. The telescope is panned across the entire surface until every section has been captured.

Stacking & Sharpening

Try it yourself — Sharpening Studio ↗︎

A single raw frame from the video is hazy and low in contrast. Around 2,000 of the best frames from each panel are aligned and stacked together, then sharpened — eliminating atmospheric distortion and revealing fine surface detail, crater walls, and highland terrain that would otherwise be invisible.

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Single frame Stacked & sharpened

Assembling the Mosaic

After every panel is processed, each one is carefully aligned and manually stitched together to form the complete full-disk image. This mosaic approach allows for far greater magnification during capture than shooting the entire Moon in a single frame — producing both the resolution and the detail needed for the deep-zoom viewer.

Revealing the Colours

Try it yourself — Mineral Studio ↗︎

Multiple colour photographs of the Moon are stacked together using a DSLR camera. With each addition, subtle colours intensify and emerge. These are the Moon's real colours — titanium-rich mare basalts appear in cool blues and purples, while iron-oxide-rich highland material glows in warm orange and gold tones.

Single photograph

Stacked colours

Composite

All elements are combined into the final image — the detailed monochrome mosaic, mineral colour layer, and glow composited together into Moon in Bloom.