Photographer shows moon’s mineral color palette by combining 150,000 photos

Astrophotography enthusiast Andrew McCarthy has published a photo of the moon with a bright color palette, instead of the white, gray and black colors we are used to seeing. To conjure up the colors he used 150,000 photos.

McCarthy explains in a topic on Reddit that he used the color data from 150,000 moon images to visualize the color palette of the moon, which is caused by the different minerals or different concentrations of minerals, such as titanium. The current color image is derived from a recent photo that McCarthy took of the supermoon, where he created a 225-megapixel image from merging a total of 150,000 images.

This original photo was taken with two different cameras; one to photograph the colors, the stars and atmospheric veil and another to capture the surface details and structures of the moon. McCarthy explains that he had put together so many photos to neutralize the negative influence of the atmosphere and remove the noise from the camera sensors.

Stacking this large amount of images also resulted in a very high precision of the moon’s colors, according to the photographer, and by applying some saturation and adjusting sharpness and contrast, he arrived at the final colored moon photo. .

He says the colors were already in that original image, but they were hidden behind the brilliance of the moon’s reflectivity. According to McCarthy, this colored moon photo shows what we could see if our eyes and brains were much more sensitive to colors.

In this process, the astrophotographer used, among other things, an Orion XT10 reflector telescope and a computer-controlled Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro. The latter is an equatorial mount to track the relatively fast-moving moon. He mainly took the photos with the special ZWO ASI224MC astronomy camera for capturing the colors. 142,000 images were taken with this device and about 2000 with the Sony A7 II full-frame camera. Finally, McCarthy used another 300mm lens to capture some stars around the moon.