Moon Madness
An attempt to show just how messed up the moon really is...
To the eye, the moon is just some white thing ‘out there’. But I’ve used some very heavy image editing to show a few things about the moon that are not normally noticed.
The moon is not made of the same stuff all over. There are the craters, which are very bright because they are rough terrain that reflects a lot of light. The special processing I used on this photo shows the outfall from the big craters as long, white streaks of debris. The distance of the outfall from the impact site is a pretty good indication of the force of these impacts.
The so called ‘seas’ of the moon are not identical. They are magma flows, and they are dominated by various minerals. The colors of the seas show this clearly: there are subtle browns, blues, and various shades in between. The colors indicate the type of minerals and sometimes are a hint s to their age as well.
The actual variations in color and texture are more subtle than what I’ve shown here. You won’t see this stuff with your eye looking through a telescope. To get the colors and patterns to stand out, I took a bright image and then toned it down to hide some of the noise you get in a short exposure. I added a ton of color saturation just to get the small amount of color you see in the image. I both sharpened the image and smoothed out the noise that results from heavy sharpening. So this is not a ‘natural’ image, but it does reveal some interesting science about the moon in a simple, visual manner.
When I look at an image like this—which has been heavily processed to bring out the color and the textures—the moon seems like a much livelier place.
Note: I pushed the color saturation pretty hard, even if it doesn’t seem terribly rich in color in the image above. I could have pushed it harder; in fact, I did, but there’s a point at which it looks false. Here’s the ‘too far’ image—which is still interesting, as long as you keep in mind that it’s enhanced a lot.
I still think that it would be pretty cool if we could see these colors with the naked eye, but it’s a lot easier to do it in image editing software than building a new moon…
Wow, this is very cool moon photo.