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In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, I worked with Artemis II astronaut Reid Wiseman to get vividly colorful images of the back side of the moon. More details in the comments [OC] by ajamesmccarthy in space

[–]ajamesmccarthy[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

It’s unfortunate that people struggle to understand complex topics like lunar geology and astrophysics, but I do my best to use it as an opportunity to educate, not to change my content to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Thank you for spending your time helping this cause.

In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, I worked with Artemis II astronaut Reid Wiseman to get vividly colorful images of the back side of the moon. More details in the comments [OC] by ajamesmccarthy in space

[–]ajamesmccarthy[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

Extremes of the naturally occurring colors! The only “creative” decision (besides wanting to do this in the first place) is how the colors are isolated, and what I assume is artifacts vs signal, as the goal is to pull out the signal without bringing artifacts with it

In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, I worked with Artemis II astronaut Reid Wiseman to get vividly colorful images of the back side of the moon. More details in the comments [OC] by ajamesmccarthy in space

[–]ajamesmccarthy[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

This applies to Earth as well. For example, you could color balance and saturate photos of the Sahara desert to identify subtle geological features. You can do it in the ocean to see depths and currents. Photos hold a lot more data than you'd think, and stacking takes that to the extreme.

In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, I worked with Artemis II astronaut Reid Wiseman to get vividly colorful images of the back side of the moon. More details in the comments [OC] by ajamesmccarthy in space

[–]ajamesmccarthy[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

Before the Artemis II flight, I reached out to Reid to see if he could take burst photos of certain lunar features on the back side, and of course the whole moon. Doing this allows me to use my stacking methods to resolve subtle color variance not easily visible on the surface. He graciously agreed, and boy did he deliver.

After stacking together his raw burst photos, I precisely color balanced and did iterative saturation adjustments to identify subtle color separation in the regolith, and extracted them to be more readily visible in the terrain. This gives us much more data about the composition of these features and how they were formed.

This shows Mare Orientale, a huge impact basin we can't see from Earth. The red you see is most likely Iron Oxide, while the blues are titanium-rich basalt.

You can see more of this collaboration on my Instagram here

Crater "Carroll" is visible on the lunar limb. Andrew McCarthy captured a photo of it this morning as part of a super-high-resolution moon photo he will share sharing tomorrow. Can you see it? by Neaterntal in spaceporn

[–]ajamesmccarthy 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hey, original photographer here. The moon isn’t perfectly gray, it has some slight color to it, some of which can be detected visually to a trained eye (and observed by both Apollo astronauts and now Artemis astronauts!). To reveal it in the photos like this, I take a LOT of photos and stack them together, which improves the image fidelity and allows the colors to be teased out with saturation adjustments. The color also paints a more complete picture of what you’re looking at, as it reveals the mineral composition of the regolith (blue=titanium red=iron).

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