Damian Peach is a friend of mine and a British planetary astrophotographer who has been sending me high-quality images for as long as I’ve been at the magazine. He just sent me word of the completion of an incredible project.

In April, a team of astroimagers gathered at the home of British astronomer and popularizer Sir Patrick Moore. There, they decided to create the largest ground-based mosaic image of the Moon and enter the Guinness World Records.

The group imaged the 9-day-old Moon through video cameras attached to long-focal-length telescopes. The team captured 1.2 million frames of video totaling 1.1 terabytes of data. Through processing, that number became almost 1,000 images.

Team member David Mason composited those into the final picture. The result is a high-resolution 87.4-megapixel image of the Moon. It shows features as small as 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) clearly. In addition to Peach and Mason, the imaging team included Pete Lawrence, Dave Tyler, Nick Howes, Trevor Little, Mark and Lea Irving, Bruce Kingsley, and Nick Smith.

Guinness World Records will present the team members with their certificates on a future date. Guinness also will award a certificate to Sir Patrick for his world record as the longest-running television presenter. All proceeds from the use of the final image will go to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. All team members volunteered their time.

Read more about this project, and see the image at www.lunarworldrecord.com.