Colors of the Lunar World
Earth’s younger sibling has been orbiting around us for roughly 4.51 billion years and still counting! Often times we take for granted what lies on the surface of the Moon as we always see the same old cheese ball lurking above every night. You may find it interesting that the moon is not just the plain old yellowish color you may have always thought of. Quite the contrary! If we look at the moon in a specific way (I will explain this a bit more later in the post), we are actually about to uncover all of the beautiful colors captured in the image above. Not only do these colors give us a different perspective of the moon, but it also uncovers the secrets of what the surface of the moon is made of! In this post, I aim to show you all how I composed this amazing image and showcase specific places on the Moons surface.
HOW I MADE THE IMAGE
Mosaics
My process of capturing the beauty of the Moon is different than simply taking a picture. Using a telescope from the Skynet network in Chile, I created a mosaic (stitching together many images to create one large image) of the moon's red, blue, and green colors. As you can see in the picture on the right, I had to take three separate mosaics, each separated by a specific color. Each of these separate shots is a collection of 25 images stitched together through Afterglow software. To capture only the color we wanted, we used different camera filters. Each filter only allows a specific color of light in. The different filters that were used consisted of an H-alpha (red), OIII (green), and U (blue). However, you may notice something weird in the red image; yes, it is missing some of the blocks! This was due to an error from the telescope; however, I was able to fix this in Photoshop later on. To get the first edition of the Moon shot, all we had to do now was to combine all of the mosaics!
Fixing the image
After combining all the colors, we now have an image resembling the Moon! Unfortunately, those missing red pieces are very obvious in our result though. As mentioned earlier, this was easily fixable by masking out the specific sections and adjusting the color balance (this is like putting our artificial red coloring in those sections).
About our moon
Copernicus and Kepler craters
Copernicus
This crater is the larger of the two measuring around 62 miles in diameter. You might ask yourself, “Why is it so much brighter than everything else?“. This is because it is so young compared to the lunar timescale! All of the solar wind and micrometeorite bombardments have not had enough time to darken it like their surrounding counterparts. It is believed that it was created around 1 billion years ago!
Kepler
The smaller of the two craters is where you will find this one. This small lunar crater is only around 20 miles in diameter and 1.5 miles deep it is said to be around the same age as Copernicus.
mare imbrium
Mare Imbrium is Latin for “Sea of Showers“it is one of the largest craters in our solar system, stretching to around 150 miles in diameter! We also think it is roughly 3.9 billion years old! These dark patches of the moon are often referred to as “maria“ translating to “seas“ in Latin. These dark patches are where molten lava pooled and cooled to create a relatively smooth surface. You may notice that there are some brown regions within the image, and that are actually titanium-rich basalts mixed with brown lava! On the bottom left of the highlighted section is part of the lunar region called Mare Serenitatis, which is a bit browner and is filled with brown, iron-rich lavas.
aristarchus crater
The Aristarchus crater is considered the brightest formation on the lunar surface, even bright enough to see with the naked eye! Within this crater falls several volcanic features and stretches 50 miles in diameter. You may notice around this area is a yellowish tint, and this is called the Aristarchus plateau. Scientists believe this is due to orange glass deposits within the surface. The bluish tint you may have spotted is titanium-rich glassy deposits that sit in proximity to the crater.
Hopefully, you all got to learn a bit about our solar system companion, and gives you an idea of how I made this image possible! I would like to thank my Professor Dr. Reichart and my TA Mae Dubay for the opportunity to capture these amazing images! Also special thanks to my group mates for all of the help and support throughout this process! If you have any questions about anything that is said within the post or just any questions about the moon in general do not hesitate to reach out to my email cecrow@unc.edu :)
