Lunar Colors

It must have been on YouTube that I first saw pictures of what was called the “mineral moon”.

Some are actually false color, created to illustrate the variety of minerals on the Moon. Others are enhancements of what is the real, albeit very slight, color. There are some folks out there that have done an amazing job of colorizing what we know to be a lifeless, monochrome celestial body that orbits our Earth. Please don’t react negatively to my description. The Moon is amazing and life on this planet would not be the same, or perhaps even exist, without it. The Moon has played a starring (or co-starring) role in many of my photographs.

The sunlight reflecting off the Moon brings beauty to the night and the gravitational force it provides gives us tides, making the earth breath in and out and nourishing our costal waters. But are there really colors? Yes. This article on Wikipedia will tell you all you ever wanted to know (and more) about lunar geology and resources. But as to the colors that can reasonably be brought out with simple image processing, my limited research has led me to understand that there are mostly oranges from iron oxide and blues from titanium dioxide.

So, back to the photo. I have learned, not only with this photo, but with all photos that if you are going to do some extreme processing you need a very low noise, high quality image to start with. A single image of the moon taken even with very good equipment will be limited in resolution or detail due to the earth’s atmosphere. To overcome this requires that many images are taken and then combined. To do this I combined 20 single images in Photoshop to reduce noise and improve detail. Then I did multiple layered adjustments to enhance the detail and bring out the subtle colors. The key to making it look believable is to stop before it looks fake.

Did I go to far?