Andrew McCarthy
@AJamesMcCarthy
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Exploring the universe from a backyard in Arizona. Get on my mailing list before my next print drop 👇
Joined May 2014
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For sharing my thousandth finished astrophoto to the world, I thought I would put together a compilation showing what my 6 year journey looked like.
This mosaic of our moon is an intimate look at my photos, from embarrassing early photos to viral shots that shaped my career.
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My finished shot from this morning's total lunar eclipse. This image was captured by using two telescopes, one to capture intricate detail on the lunar surface, and one to capture the rich tones cast by Earth's shadow across the disc. Go ahead, zoom in on it!
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Throwback to the time I was shooting the sun and a plane flew perfectly through it, and a bunch of smart strangers figured out which flight it was and got me in touch with the pilot, who was thrilled 🥰
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That's a MOON of Jupiter. Making an eclipse. On Jupiter. That I'm capturing "from space" 367 MILLION miles away. How could someone NOT become absolutely addicted to this hobby?
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Mars is at it's closest to Earth. Here's a photo I captured of it last night using a 14" telescope. You can clearly see the northern polar ice cap! I'm working hard to learn to overcome the challenges of planetary photography to bring you the best images of Mars at opposition.
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I had to drive to California to get this one. My clearest image of Saturn, at it's closest to Earth. Captured from the roof of a parking garage after driving all day.
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After spending all night shooting around 600,000 photos of it, I’m thrilled to show you my sharpest Jupiter shot so far. This was captured using an 11” telescope and a camera I usually use for deep sky work.
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Using two telescopes and over 280,000 individual photos, I captured my most detailed image of our moon. The full size is over a gigapixel. Trust me, you’ll want to zoom in on this one.
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After staying up all night shooting it, here's my shot of Jupiter at "Opposition". This is the closest its been to Earth in 59 years.
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This is the moment Mars peeked out from behind our moon after being hidden for an hour. This shot was captured using my largest telescope and a special high-speed camera. Seeing another planet rising on the horizon of our moon was such a surreal experience.
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A composite image from this morning's eclipse showing the moon in various stages throughout the night. The size and shape of Earth's shadow is clearly visible here. These events are absolutely magical to witness and quite surreal.
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I took a photo of something 2.5 MILLION light years away: The Andromeda galaxy. This was done by combining over 30 hours of exposures captured over a couple weeks. This was done entirely from my backyard using a telescope that is shorter than the keyboard I'm typing this on.
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Last night I captured an incredibly difficult shot: ISS transiting the moon, while gently kissing Tycho crater as it flies by at 5 miles per second. That crater is 53 miles wide, so while the station almost looks like it's orbiting the moon it's actually 1000x closer to us.
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I took an 85 megapixel shot of the moon last night by blending together 24,000 individual image frames.
#astrophotography
#opteam
#space
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If you ever see someone with a telescope on the sidewalk, please come bother them. Nothing pleases me more than watching the reaction of someone seeing a planet with their own eyes for the first time.
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I TOOK A PHOTO OF MARS! I stayed up til the wee hours this morning when Mars was directly overhead, and used my 11" telescope and took about 160,000 images over a 30 minute period to get this: My best photo of the red planet so far!
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Happening right now: This is the Total Lunar Eclipse- visible over all of North America as I type this. I'm shooting pictures of it all night so I'll share them here as soon as I can.
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Totality: An HDR composite image of yesterday's eclipse. This photo used 5 cameras to capture thousands of photos during a 4 minute period.
My goal was to capture the magic of the visual experience, and I hope this photo evokes similar emotions I experienced while watching it.
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I was recently asked what would happen if I used the same equipment I shot planets with to shoot our moon.
Well, this: A 562 megapixel image, featuring one of the most detailed looks at the craters of our moon I've ever done. Zoom in to your heart's content.
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Yesterday morning I captured an incredibly brief and rare event, the ISS transiting the 4% illuminated moon during the daytime.
#astrophotography
#space
#opteam
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Here's a photo of Saturn I captured from my backyard last night. Have you ever seen it through a telescope? It was life-changing for me.
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In 36 hours, Earth’s shadow will temporarily be cast onto our moon, creating a lunar eclipse. When the moon is completely covered, it will take on a red hue: the projection of thousands of sunsets onto the lunar surface. Here’s one of my captures from a previous eclipse.
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On Friday, the sun put on a dazzling show for us. My friend
@TheVastReaches
and I worked hard over the last 5 days to produce this incredibly detailed 140 megapixel image to illustrate how wonderfully dynamic and beautiful our star can be. Make sure you zoom in!
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One of the most difficult shots I've ever attempted, here is the
@Space_Station
captured in broad daylight as it transited the waxing crescent moon. Captured using two telescopes in tandem, This is the most detailed transit shot I've ever achieved of the ISS.
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If you own a telescope, spread the love. I just spent the whole night showing trick-or-treaters Saturn and Jupiter. Watching them (and their parents) suddenly realize space is quite accessible is incredibly gratifying. Space is up there waiting for everyone to discover it.
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I used a modified telescope to capture high-speed video of the eclipse at a long focal length. Seeing the lumpy mountains of the moon against a backdrop of churning plasma is incredibly surreal.
(I hope you weren't sick of eclipse posts 😜)
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Friday I captured around 200k images of our sun. I asked my friend
@TheVastReaches
for help working all the data so we could create an incredibly detailed image of our star, and we're nearly done. Take a look at this close crop of the final 140 MP pic we'll be sharing tomorrow:
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I shot over a terabyte worth of photos last week to bring you a 1.3 gigapixel photo of the moon. This waning gibbous moon is the highest resolution I’ve ever done of this phase, and one of my clearest moon photos overall. Zoom in!
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Last night I took my sharpest photo of Mars since I first got into astrophotography 5 years ago. This was captured using a 14" telescope on the sidewalk in front of my house. You can clearly see Olympus Mons!
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I spent 3 hours yesterday with my solar telescope pointed at a tall tornado-y looking thing on the sun. This 14-Earths-tall swirling column of plasma was raining moon-sized gobs of incandescent material on the sun. I can't imagine a more hellish place.
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Thrilled to share my first proper Milky Way shot in years. This was captured off a small island far from city lights, allowing me to see the incredible detail of our galactic core. If more people could see the night sky like this, I believe the world would be a better place.
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It was absolutely magnificent.
This is an unedited photo (with the dust specks to prove it). There is an HDR photo captured using 5 telescopes coming soon, just give me a bit to go through all my thousands of photos :)
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Last night I captured an 85 megapixel photo of our moon by using two telescopes and two cameras. Check out the details up close! The color is real, but much more subtle to your eyes. Increasing saturation reveals the rich geological history of our moon!
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The first full moon of the year, the 2023 Wolf Moon, is upon us. Here's a detailed shot captured this evening from my backyard. This was captured using two cameras and two telescopes. Despite hazy conditions, I thought it turned out nice.
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I spent the morning freezing my butt off on the side of the road to get a shot of this: That’s the International Space Station moving Mach 25 in low earth orbit transiting the moon 1000x further away!
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Yesterday I spent hours capturing this: an intricately detailed photo of the sun shot using a specially modified telescope. Here it is in the full 164 Megapixels, so you can zoom into every nitty gritty detail. That sunspot group on the top is currently pointed right at Earth!
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In 2019 this photo of the moon changed my life. I went from a nobody to Andrew McCarthy: astrophotographer. Thank you for supporting me back then for liking and and sharing it!
Anyways, here’s a mobile wallpaper of the image because I love you.
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My favorite photo from this morning's launch. Captured using techniques I've never used before, it exceeded my expectations in every way. I feel this photo perfectly illustrates the beauty and power of Starship.
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The most rushed shot I've ever captured in my life. A
@SpaceX
rocket just flew over my backyard. It was moving so fast I barely had time to grab a camera. This might be one of my favorite shots of all time, and it's a miracle it's in focus.
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So happy to finally share this shot with you: a conjunction of the ISS and the moon. This shot required meticulous planning and precise timing to achieve, and the full image (in the second post in the thread) is one of my all-time favorites.
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I used my largest telescope and around 125,000 photos to capture Saturn in detail last night. Steady conditions allowed me to capture it much more clearly than previous efforts.
The planet is the closest to Earth tomorrow night, so it will be high in the sky all night long.
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I'm thrilled to share the most science-fiction looking shot I've ever captured: here's the International Space Station against the backdrop of Oceanus Procellarum on the moon. I'm absolutely obsessed with how this one turned out.
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Here’s a timelapse I captured of the annular eclipse from Saturday morning. Seeing it like this really helps me visualize the movement of the sun and the moon.
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This morning I captured a detailed picture of our moon, but what's that at the bottom?
#astrophotography
#space
#opteam
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This one time I teamed up with my friend
@MatherneConnor
to take the most ridiculously detailed moon photo we possibly could, and we ended up with this:
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I captured the Eclipse using 5 different telescopes. It will be a lot of work to combine all the data into the final image I envisioned when I took the trip to Utah to capture it, but in the meantime admire this beautiful shot out of my 8" telescope with a white light filter.
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Here's Earth to scale added to my latest picture of the sun. Yeah, the sun is pretty big.
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Here’s my first effort at capturing the “Green Comet”, Comet c/2022 E3 (ZTF). This was a particular challenge due to humid conditions and clouds, but I’m thrilled I was able to capture it at all!
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The light from these galaxies colliding was emitted 23 MILLION years ago, and then travelled across intergalactic space only to be caught by my telescope 3 feet before hitting the ground. I get an existential crisis when I think too much about the mechanics of my hobby.
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My first launch, and it was the experience of a lifetime.
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I know everyone is super interested in the eclipse photos right now, but the day before the "blood moon" I captured this: One of my most detailed pictures of our star. This was done using a specially modified telescope and involved taking around 70,000 individual pictures.
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Since everyone loved my last Saturn shot so much, I thought I'd take another crack at it. This is my sharpest image so far of the ringed planet. Featuring 5 moons and a photobombing star, this composite image was created from over 80,000 photos captured through my telescope.
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I used two telescopes to capture this super detailed shot of the Full Harvest Moon right as it cleared the clouds. I live for these moments.
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Zooming into my latest gigapixel moon photo.
Created using around 150,000 individual images and two cameras/telescopes to get the most obscenely detailed image I could. Zoom in yourself using the link in the second post.
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My shot of the 2023 Snow moon, with the hidden colors of the mineral revealed. This 148 megapixel shot was captured using two telescopes and two cameras to present the scene in extreme fidelity.
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This is a galaxy that's 20 MILLION light years away. Just think about that for a second. The light left this galaxy during the Miocene period and travelled across intergalactic space for 20 million years only to be caught by my telescope 5 feet before hitting the Earth.
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Throwback to last December when Mars popped out from behind the full moon, and I got this photo with my telescope. Feels like science fiction, but it’s real!
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I still can't believe I can get detailed photos of other worlds like this. This is Ganymede, nearly the size of Mars, orbiting Jupiter 400 million miles away. Photos like this help me appreciate just how powerful backyard telescopes are.
Captured Thursday from a 14" scope.
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My first image of Saturn versus my most recent. The telescope and camera used were nearly identical, what changed was my knowledge of how to capture it. This was 3 years of progress.
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Yesterday I took a massive 140 megapixel image of the sun. But there is something uniquely special about this image, that made it one of my most difficult shots ever. So, what is it?
#astrophotography
#space
#opteam
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Possibly my new favorite shot of all time. I woke up at 1:30am this morning to capture a rare scene- the sunlit international space station transiting iconic craters over the last quarter moon.
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I got it! Mars reappearing after being temporarily hidden by the moon. I got a ton of footage, I'm going to clean it up and share images soon!
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Annularity: The moment the moon transited the center of the sun. Captured with multiple telescopes to show the incredibly dynamic structures in the solar atmosphere. The full image (shared in the second post) is super high resolution 🤓
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I traveled halfway across the world to try and take the best photo of the Milky Way I could. After spending a full month on it, the resulting image is my most detailed and most complete photo of our home galaxy. What do you think, was it worth the effort?
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Due to the volume of people asking- I wanted to illustrate where you can find the Apollo landing sites on my GigaMoon image- complete with zooming down to see the landers
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Here’s a 4K image of the moon captured using two telescopes and two cameras, with both detail and color pushed to the extreme. I formatted it like this so you can use as a PC wallpaper.
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Here's a closeup of the bright prominence that many people reported seeing with their naked eye during the eclipse. This was captured using two telescopes- at 2000mm and at 3650mm.
These prominences are part of the solar chromosphere, and normally require a specially modified…
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I've been shooting Jupiter almost every night for the last 6 weeks. Here's the timelapse I was able to create by aligning all the shots where the Great Red Spot was centered. This was a ton of work, so I'm thrilled it turned out this good despite constantly changing conditions
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There it is, folks. The largest solar prominence I’ve ever witnessed. This is what I spent all day yesterday chasing down as it lifted off the solar chromosphere. The resulting CME was launched millions of miles into space.
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Two years ago, I teamed up with fellow astrophotographer and planetary scientist
@MatherneConnor
to capture the most ridiculously detailed moon image we could. Over the last few months we put our heads together again to come up with something even clearer. Behold:
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For the last couple years, I have fully delved into backyard astrophotography from the city. My most common question- what kind of gear is needed if someone wants to learn to take these photos? Here is a full thread on the topic.
#astrophotography
#space
#opteam
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I took an obscenely high resolution photo of the moon on Wednesday. Zoom in and check out the details!
(Uploaded only 25% of the original image size due to twitter image size limits)
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I pointed a 12" telescope at the leftmost star in Orion's belt for 20 hours to reveal the Horsehead Nebula and surrounding objects. This is my deepest and most detailed image of that region, captured in true color. Make sure you zoom in to check out all the little details!
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About to capture Jupiter pop out from the dark side of the moon, wish me luck
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I took an absurdly high resolution shot of our moon during broad daylight. This composite image was captured using two telescopes and two cameras to recreate this beautiful scene. View and download the 96 megapixel image here:
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A composite image of last night's moon, presented in 55 megapixels for your enjoyment. The colors are completely real, and a result of saturating the surface to reveal the mineral composition.
#astrophotography
#space
#opteam
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After sharing my recent shot of Mars, people were asking about my best Jupiter and Saturn pics. Here they are! Jupiter was captured the day after opposition, and Saturn a few weeks after (opposition is when they're largest in the sky). It took a long time to learn how to do this!
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These are all photos captured with my telescope from my suburban backyard over the last few months. Sometimes I still can't believe this is possible.
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My best shots of Jupiter and Saturn when they were closer to Earth late last year.
Capturing planets in details is counterintuitively harder than capturing a galaxy for me, just because they’re so much smaller in the sky.
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Reviewing these monstrous moon images up close is key to making sure they look good in print. This one gets my seal of approval. Look at all the hidden details 👀
This goes out to my email and X subscribers Wednesday. It’s more than just a detailed moon photo.
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I modified one of my telescopes to be able to look at the sun.
This is what it's looking at right now: The sun's incredibly dynamic atmosphere.
DO NOT attempt to do this unless you know what you're doing, you could easily blind yourself.
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Look in the upper arm of this galaxy- you'll see a star appear to blink in and out of existence. That's a supernova! Very recently discovered in m101: the Pinwheel galaxy (which I happened to be shooting when this happened)
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My Christmas gift to you- my most detailed moon image, ever. Captured two nights ago during pristine conditions. Hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday this year despite everything we've all been through.
#astrophotography
#space
#opteam
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This is how much the comet moved in just 10 minutes tonight. This thing is FLYING. Must be moving close to 100,000mph right now.
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My recent video of the International Space Station drew a lot of questions, so before I release the image I captured I thought I would put together a thread describing exactly how you can capture a similar photo! 👇
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I spent 40 hours with a small telescope pointed at part of the sky to capture this: A supernova's shockwave travelling through space. It's over 6x wider than the full moon in the sky, just too faint to see without proper equipment. Zoom in and check out all the crazy details!
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This is one of my most detailed photos of the moon ever. You can see the big craters, of course, but they’re 50-100 miles wide. When you zoom in you can see mile-wide craters and mountains. Zoom in where the light meets the shadow and see what I mean.
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My last image of the international space station brought a lot of "interesting" conversations to the thread say the least. Everything from the moon is a hologram to I'm paid by NASA to fake these images. Here's a short thread about my take on these ideas.
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I used a telescope and took 30,000 pictures to give you a detailed look at last night's waxing crescent moon. Make sure you load it in 4k so you can view all the crater-y details!
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Every year I put together my best images from our solar system into one composite. I call it my annual "Family Portrait". This is what this year's looks like. Each image was captured from my backyard over the past year.
#astrophotography
#space
#opteam
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Hubble just dropped some amazing new photos. This one of Ganymede transiting Jupiter reminded me of one I shot in September, so I thought I’d compare. Still can’t compete with a space telescope, but getting closer!
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I saw my first annular eclipse today! Stay tuned: more photos coming!
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I spent 7 hours shooting around a million photos of our sun, hoping to capture a solar flare. What I captured was incredible- back to back flares launching material into space!
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I captured Ganymede’s dance with Jupiter by stitching together every photo I took of Jupiter over a several hour period. This was the first time I’ve been able to resolve surface details on a Galilean moon.
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I heard someone recently say the international space station doesn't exist. Rather than argue with them, I thought I'd share a bit of knowledge. Did you know you can easily capture it yourself?
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I spent 27 days shooting over 2 million photos of the moon to capture how it dances in our sky. This is the most detailed “Lunation” I’ve ever captured.
#astrophotography
#space
#opteam
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Yesterday I took a 300 megapixel photo of our star. This was done by using a specially modified telescope and over 150,000 individual images. Do NOT point a regular telescope at the sun.
#Astrophotography
#space
#opteam
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That little dot isn’t a star. That’s Jupiter, emerging from behind the moon, half covered by the shadowed portion. This is a single raw photo captured a few moments ago.
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