Contains:  Solar system body or event
The Moon in color, day 16.3, Mark L Mitchell

The Moon in color, day 16.3

The Moon in color, day 16.3, Mark L Mitchell

The Moon in color, day 16.3

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Description

The moon has no color to the naked eye. It is just gray and the astronauts reported that it was mostly shades of brown. But if you take a photograph of the moon and increase the color saturation of the image, you can exaggerate some colors on the lunar surface that correlate with the mineral content of the lunar crust. This is a single photograph of the moon at 1 day past full, shot with a DSLR through my 5” refractor (1/250, f7.5, ISO 100). I increased the color saturation and you can see areas that are light gray, dark gray, blue-gray, and reddish-brown. The bluer areas in the mares are basalt that is rich in titanium oxide in a mineral called ilmenite. The reddish-brown areas have a higher iron content. Some of these areas are rich in pyroclastic glass (e.g., the Aristarchus plateau). There is a faint reddish-brown ring around the prominent crater Tycho in the southwest. You can also see that the relatively recent ejecta from the crater Copernicus are overlying titanium-rich basalt in the huge Oceanus Procellarum in the northwest.

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The Moon in color, day 16.3, Mark L Mitchell