The moon in color

I was inspired by this shot to try my own color enhanced moon image.

The colors are not made up -- They are just amplified in photoshop. In a typical picture of the moon, the whole thing looks grey, but some of those grey pixels actually have a tiny bluish tint to them, and others have a tiny reddish tint, etc. Photoshop amplifies that tiny difference.

The color info in the original was so slight that I was amazed it actually meant anything, but it seems everybody gets basically the same color pattern on the moon. Mine looks quite similar to the one I liked to above, and this one is stretched like a flat map projection but has the same colors in the same places as well, with a legend explaining what the different colors indicate about the composition of the rock.

The trickiest part is color balancing the original image so that it doesn't turn solid red or blue or yellow when you increase the saturation. I actually color balanced the image twice and generated two separate super-colorized versions by repeatedly saturating the image. For some reason, doing saturation 10 times in small increments seems to look better than doing it all at once. I then blended them together (one was a bit too overdone, the other a bit too under-done) and used the greyish original as a luminosity layer.

On 10/5/2006 or 10/6/2006, I forget which, I took three series of pictures of the moon -- One series using extremely short exposures (1/4000th of a second), one set using long exposures (1/250th of a second) , and one set with medium length exposures (1/500th second). I didn't have my remote shutter release at the time, so the shortest exposuers were noticably sharper than the longer ones. The 1/4000th second exposures were stacked and became this one.

This image is made from combining the 1/500th second exposures, around 40-45 of them. The contrast was better in each individual frame, but they were just a bit blurry.