• FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
    372·
    5 days ago

    I don’t know anything about moon pictures, my best attempt was not great

    But how did they composite 81,000 images without worrying about atmospheric lensing distorting the proportions as it moved across the sky for 4 days? Is it just negligible?

  • naeap@sopuli.xyz
    29·
    5 days ago

    What is it with the blue/violet/red-yellow stuff?

    Is this some metallic thing?

    • fossilesque@mander.xyzOPEnglish
      33·
      5 days ago

      Knowing what I know, I am assuming this image was standardised and then normalised (fancy stats algos to keep things in the same visual range) while stitching it together, and the final product enhanced a lot of colouration (saturation). They’re subtle or undetectable to the naked eye, but they exist. They are reflected in the different minerals present. I’ve done this stuff (raster stitching) with different imagery. Op was active in the comments with info, but I didn’t read up on it.

      • foofiepie@lemmy.world
        44·
        5 days ago

        Pasted from the Reddit thread:

        The colors don’t match what a human eye would see, but without going into a philosophy tangent, color is extremely complex and a huge part of what a human sees is your brain doing representations and mapping that isn’t perfectly represented in the physical object being observed. In this photo the saturation has been increased (versus a human eye) because it helps show the geological differences on the lunar surface. The reddish areas are high in iron and feldspar, and the blue-tinted zones have higher titanium content. Instead of thinking of the color as “real” or “fake” it’s probably better to think of it as a tool, to simulate if you were a super human with the ability to adjust saturation and detect metal composition with your eye. Usually when a photo like this is shared by researchers and scientist all this nuance and exposition is included, but then journalist and social media get a hold of it and people start crying “fake” without an understanding of what the image is trying to accomplish. TL;DR - The image isn’t what a human eye would see but it isn’t just art to look cool, the color and modifications have physical meaning and serve a purpose.

  • nnullzz@lemmy.world
    17·
    5 days ago

    With all the impacts the moon seems to take, is there any footage of a new crater being made? That would be super cool to see.

  • 3volver@lemmy.world
    9·
    5 days ago

    This image does a good job at making me realize we have explored basically nothing on the moon. SO much more to explore, yet we act like there’s no point trying to send more astronauts to the moon for decades. Please, increase NASA budget more.

  • j4k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    5 days ago

    I imagine the yellowish tinted areas are mostly sulfur from volcanic ash emissions. That middle picture, in the section between the two mare, it looks like how beach sand is altered after being inundated with water. In general, most of the surface looks like pulverized sand on a beach, at a high level abstracted perspective view. That one section between the mare looks whetted by comparison. Perhaps ash altered the consistency enough to create a similar type of compacted appearance, but if there was water and vulcanism in the area, perhaps that was the Lunar version of Yellowstone.

    Funny that the most recent research on the anomalous regions inside the Earth’s mantle have now been linked to the Theia collision through the mantle hotspot activity. So it is likely that the moon and Yellowstone are directly linked. It would be interesting to find that the regional anomalies on the moon are likewise of a similar origin. It would be interesting to me if Yellowstone’s doppelganger is right there in plain sight as well.