The FULLER moon! Photographer pieces together 200,000 lunar snaps to reveal every crater and crevice

Stunning new pictures offer the most in-depth views yet of the moon’s rugged surface, revealing every crevice in incredible details.

The enhanced photographs show every mountain, crater and cave in the lunar landscape – making the moon more accessible to the human eye than ever before. 

They were taken by photographer Andrew McCarthy, better known to his Instagram followers as @cosmic_background, who painstakingly created the unique effect using 200,000 separate images. 

He used height data provided by Nasa and 3D software to show the differences between the lunar sea and the lunar highlands.

Mr McCarthy, from Arizona, USA, said: ‘By exaggerating the elevation of features on the moon, you can really show off how different the maria is relative to the highlands. The heavily cratered highlands seem incredibly treacherous compared to the smooth basalt in the lunar seas.

A huge 200 megapixel image of the moon – showing the most realistic surface of the moon ever taken, with every mountain and cave in the lunar landscape able to see in high definition

‘This image is a blend of cgi with real images, using height data provided by Nasa.’

He went on: ‘I think that the moon is one of the most important objects in space, it is a stepping stone to the rest of the universe. 

‘By making these pictures I wanted to get people more interested and excited about exploring the frontiers of humanity and space.’ 

To make the finished pictures, Mr McCarthy used 3D software to superimpose hundreds of thousands of still photographs on top of each other. 

Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy has taken hundreds of images of the Moon’s surface and super imposed them to create a realistic effect

The dazzling array of craters, dimples and imperfections on the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year-old neighbour was first revealed on Mr McCarthy’s Instagram account in February and he is continuing to wow his 454,000 followers.

Mr McCarthy described the snaps, titled ‘All Terminator’, as a ‘beast of a project’.

‘This moon might look a little funny to you, and that’s because it is an impossible scene,’ he said on his Instagram account. 

These incredible pictures show the most realistic images of the moon’s surface ever taken

The photographs show every mountain and cave in the lunar landscape, making the moon more accessible to the human eye than ever before

Normally only a few can be seen but astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy stacked thousands of pictures together over moon phases to show it off in all its glory

‘From two weeks of images of the waxing moon, I took the section of the picture that has the most contrast (right before the lunar terminator where shadows are the longest), aligned and blended them to show the rich texture across the entire surface.

‘This was exhausting to say the least, namely because the moon doesn’t line up day over day, so each image had to be mapped to a 3D sphere and adjusted to make sure each image aligned.’