true color of the moon

What color is the moon? I went online with this question.

Uranus palette

The entire first page of the search engine answers this question in the same way. When the Moon is low, its light travels through a large layer of atmosphere that absorbs blue light, causing the Moon to appear red and orange. The Blue Moon, sung by Boris Moiseev, appears due to large dust in the air, scattering all colors except blue. At its zenith, the Moon is light yellow, where a small layer of atmosphere absorbs the red. How purple is obtained is a mystery of nature, but the mechanism is obviously similar.

Only these are not the colors of the moon, but of the air. We see the sun in the same colors, although its light is initially white for our vision.

Apollo palette

Fortunately, people have visited the moon and filmed the process on color video cameras. There is no atmosphere on the Moon, so you can look at our satellite through the eyes of eyewitnesses from a close distance: color video from the Apollo 16 mission.

You can believe in the color of the recording only by looking at the details: the armbands on the shoulders of the astronauts, thermal insulation. Almost everything else is dirty gray, like the view from a window in St. Petersburg. Well, the quality of the recording does not allow to distinguish subtle shades.

Fortunately, the surface on which tourists from the Earth walked – the lunar regolith was brought to earth and well studied. The lunar soil is a loose, uneven-grained detrital-dust layer, reaching a thickness of several tens of meters, without pronounced layers. Consists of fragments of volcanic rocks, minerals, glass and meteorites. Color from dark gray to black, with inclusions of large particles that have a mirror white sheen. Particles easily rise up due to the impact of meteorites and adhere well to any surface, because they are actively electrified. According to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, regolith has a characteristic burning smell in the Earth’s atmosphere.

It turns out, in many places, the moon is really 50 shades of gray, and the taste is far from cheese.

The fun fact is that moon dust is the source of the hyperstructure myth. Due to the regolith, the surface heats up very quickly in the sun and cools in the shade, as if the Moon was made of thin foil. When scientists suggested that the Moon is more likely covered with dusty sand than consists of foil, there was a fear that there was no solid core at all and astronauts would not be able to walk there, only to swim.

Well, the composition of the surface is the answer to the riddle of the color of the moon? Not yet, because the samples are taken from some places, but what about the entire surface as a whole?

Selena’s palette

Quiet moonlit night…

Heard in the depths of the chestnut tree

The nucleolus gnaws at the worm.

Fortunately, not only Basho loved to contemplate the moon, but since 2009 the device Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The observatory has compiled a complete color map of the Moon’s surface using cameras, along with a relief map using a laser altimeter.

In fact, the map is a compilation of many images from the central latitudes of the Moon (from 70°N to 70°S) and from different parts of the spectrum. Some of the original images are black and white, and the color itself is the result of a model that predicts how the human eye should the moon without interference from distance, atmosphere, and camera distortion.

This is good scientific data, but too refined. Randomness and slight distortion make the tube sound tube, and natural vanillin tastes better than artificial.

Palette Phoebe

Fortunately, in addition to the compiled data, there are very high-quality photographs of the Moon taken with long-exposure cameras and telescopes that automatically track the selected object.

In this image by astrophotographer Rami Ammoun, we can see both the grey-brown gamut of Orbitr and the yellowish sheen created by the atmosphere for the object at the zenith and blue, burgundy and even yellow-green areas.

And yet it’s colorful! Are these colors real? The color saturation of the image is slightly increased, but the geology of the Moon suggests that this is not a “fiction” of the camera.

The lighter surfaces are the lunar highlands, which are called continents, while the darker areas are called seas, despite the absence of liquid water. The continents are poor in iron and calcium (that’s where the white color comes from), so they are lighter. The dominant rock in the lunar highlands is rich in calcium and is called anorthosite.

The lunar seas are composed of basalts, dark volcanic rocks that form as a result of the rapid cooling of lava rich in magnesium and iron. It turns out that the lunar seas were once seas of lava.

But basalts are not always black. Sometimes they contain olivine, which, as you might guess, gives some parts of the moon a barely noticeable olive hue. Also, gray regolith may have red tints due to iron oxide, and blue due to titanium content.

Results of the year from color blind

Due to the peculiarities of observation and the dusty surface, the Moon looks different to us. Someone will be lucky to observe an inexplicable purple atmospheric effect, someone will be able to see olivine, and someone will be able to see titanium. The moments of contemplation are unique. Proven by science. Happy viewing