Astrophotographer showed a photo of a solar eclipse that took 5 months to create: it looks like another world

American astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy spent five months creating a hyper-detailed photo of the annular solar eclipse. He created the image in collaboration with his colleague Dan Stein. As a result, the full image contains 1.69 gigapixels and looks like a photo of the other world.

McCarthy posted the full image and its details on his Instagram page. To make the image, he and Stein placed many cameras in the Utah desert in October 2023, and then combined thousands of images into one large-scale frame. You can zoom in and see it in full detail at this link.

"Dan's incredible background in landscape photography, combined with my experience photographing the Sun in h-alpha format, gave us the skill set needed to create something unique, unlike any landscape photo I've ever seen. It seems alien, but it was taken right here on Earth," McCarthy wrote.

The image is called "Ring of the Gods". On the eve of its publication, the photographers showed an animated trailer of their work. They compiled thousands of static frames to show events on a cosmic scale – how the Moon's shadow passes over the surface of the Sun, which is constantly undergoing its inherent processes, including coronal mass ejections.

According to McCarthy, the photo itself is quite simple. It uses a very simple combination of HDR with some adjustment, which allows to combine the photos of the star made through the filter with ordinary landscape shots.

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