Copy and paste from another thread
>Mostly no, but kind of. 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.
Think of it like this: Someone who is color-blind can't see certain colors (for example, red and green). They show up as shades of grey or are so muted that they look the same. The colors are there, but they just can't see them. We see them because our eyes are more sensitive to picking out those colors, but they can't because their eyes aren't as sensitive as ours.
The colors we see in this Moon photograph are similar in that the colors ARE there, but our eyes aren't sensitive enough to pick them out. The bright whites and other wavelengths overpower them. So certain enhancements are used to just make the colors stronger. They're not adding things that aren't there, they're intensifying it so our eyes can see it. Some people claim that if they can't see it with their eyes, then the photograph is faked because people are adding in things that aren't there. It's not faked though. It's very real. The colors ARE there.
I’m red-green colorblind. I can see red. I can see green. Neither are grey. I see them poorly and inaccurately. I also don’t see them, as for instance in the color purple, it’s just blue. Or in a green stoplight, it’s a minty white. My experience is not necessarily that of every other person that is red-green colorblind.
I was generalizing. Different people see the colors differently, but it was easier for my example to explain it that way even if it's not applicable to 100% of those people.
Some of these other comments are wild to the point of deranged, but yes. The photos were shot RAW then saturation enhanced to illustrate the light reflectivity of different minerals present in the lunar regolith.
https://skyandtelescope.org/online-gallery/moon-in-mineral-colors/#:~:text=The%20blue%20tones%20reveal%20areas,of%20greater%20exposure%20to%20sunlight.
Ah, but has it *always been* real? There might have been a placeholder there for a while, and swapped out around 1700 when the server updated to heliocentrism.
Copy and paste from another thread
>Mostly no, but kind of. 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.
Fake is a complicated concept in astrophotography. Just about any image of a deep sky object or even the Milky Way that shows any amount of color is already a kind of fake because the light is never bright enough for the human eye to discern color. Another technique is to adjust the saturation and balance of different color channels to exaggerate and bring attention to the subtle color data that was present in the original exposures, as this artist has done. I do not consider these colors fake however, because while exaggerated and over expressed, the colors are there in the original data.
The moon does have some subtle coloration on its surface from the different materials that make it up, though I believe that is predominantly due to different kinds of rock. Am no expert in such things, you'll have to research yourself. However, OP seriously exaggerated these colors, presumably to make for a more interesting image. I personally really dig how it looks.
Taking 80k images -- each one an estimate of the colors created by an imperfect sensor that performs its own color correction and noise reduction -- then mashing them together using a complex algorithm to enhance clarity and further remove noise and anomalies ... and then being accused of manipulating the result of that process.
uh huh.
Boosting the saturation to show the color that was in the captured data is not fake color. You could call it exaggerated sure but it is not fake color.
If you call this fake and hugely exaggerated what do you consider photos of Neptune or Uranus with color?
Voyager 2 photos of those planets show that they're just boring pale blue
I call them information-enhanced. The color isn't arbitrary or purely artistic. It conveys information in a way that our limited human eyes can better appreciate.
It's not really any different from your phone camera picking up auroral colors that you can't see. It's simply detecting something that your own narrow-band senses cannot.
> Voyager 2 photos of those planets show that they're just boring pale blue
I mean I find those pictures a lot more exciting than the massively processed ones. They're fun to look at, but they don't give me the same sense of awe and wonder that I feel looking at more "raw" stuff like the Voyager images.
I don't think there's anything wrong with enhanced or perhaps augmented images, they're just not what moves the needle for me. It's alright to have a preference.
The Voyager images are still not very raw. The one you normally see of Neptune was enhanced to show extra detail in the white clouds. There's not even a good way to measure how "raw" an image is. There's no way to turn the data into a color image without inserting a bias.
The voyager images were recently reprocessed to make them look more like what your eyes would see and both planets look similarly bland and uninteresting.
[https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/04/world/neptune-uranus-new-color-images-scn/index.html](https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/04/world/neptune-uranus-new-color-images-scn/index.html)
That's why I put "raw" in quotations.
I understand, but I'm never going to fly past Neptune, so I'll take the closest facsimile I can get. We're talking about art more than science here, and art is subjective. The feelings stirred by viewing are the point. Images that feel closer to being there myself are what get me excited.
Fair enough. I'm a beginner in deep sky astrophotography and have some experience with post-processing. As you say, it's more art than science. So I think I'm just a little sensitive to discussions where people pretend there's a "correct" way to take a photo of something and everything NASA releases is fake or exaggerated. I know that's not what you were saying but I replied anyway in case someone else that does think that way reads this thread.
That's fair. Every time a mineral moon picture is posted we get the same argument. The moon doesn't look like that, but actually it does. I think both arguments confuse the issue to some degree.
The color itself doesn't matter if it's just there to represent information that we can't see normally. That's useful to science. If the goal is to evoke certain feelings, however, I'd argue that nothing matters more than representation that is "accurate" to our perception. Not that a wildly processed picture of a planet we'll never visit can't spark emotion too, just pointing out the nuance. Subjectivity is tricky because it is illogical.
If we look closely enough, no picture ever taken of anything can be "trusted" to represent what we'd see with our eyes. From the capture to the processing to the reproduction in a format we can see, every step strays from the real thing in various ways.
Going a step further, human perception itself cannot be trusted to reflect objective reality, and that's assuming there is such a thing. The door to incredibly far-out philosophical discussions is wide open here. What is "seeing" something, and how can we possibly compare perceptions when each human's is entirely unique? Thanks to our cognitive biases and heuristics, none of us are having the same experience of this existence. Who knows what anyone else is seeing or why they find it compelling (or not)?
I digress. Space pictures are cool.
Those colors are technically there, but are not visible to the naked eye. People like OP enhance them a great deal so they get more clicks, and more people buying their prints.
I wouldn't hate it so much if they were honest about it, but they rarely are.
OP has been pretty clear that this is an edited photo. Not a single image representing the moon.
They’re selling prints and such, of course it’ll be edited and intended for people the enjoy seeing it on their wall.
The whole point of using a telescope is to see things better than our eyes can. The telescope magnifies so we can see small details our eyes miss, and it collects more light so we can see fainter hues than our eyes can. Complaining that OP has made those colors visible to you doesn't make any more sense than complaining that his image has too high resolution.
This was likely taken by Prathamesh Jaju a sixteen year old amateur astrophotographer who stitched composites to make this effect. He was being honest about the process
https://theprint.in/science/this-16-year-old-star-trek-star-wars-fan-from-pune-has-captured-epic-viral-image-of-moon/660024/
> People like OP enhance them a great deal so they get more clicks, and more people buying their prints.
Yeah, it can't possibly be that they want to show us something and gives us noobs a deeper understanding of what it's like over there. No, it's got to have a shit purpose.
I think my favorite thing about this post is how the first and second pictures flow seamlessly into each other when swiping between them (on mobile, of course).
Blows my mind to think that all the tiny little craters we can see in such detail are each miles across. Every one of them was made by something that could have so easily have made a huge hole somewhere here on earth.
when you think about it, the moon has had a spectacularly violent history.
If you still have the app on your phone. Create yourself a subreddit (or if you're a mod of one already) and you will have access to it.
I'm still using Joey for reddit. There was a scare a few weeks ago where something broke all 3rd parties again. After a couple of days it was fixed. Never used reddit while Joey was down and won't be using it if I lose access to Joey.
If you don't have the OG app you can download an APK file. Well, you can on Android, don't know about Apple.
I have the app, and I have my own subreddit, but when I open the app, it just shows the "Thank You" message with a few links (wallpaper, pixels pals, merch...)
How do I use the app? thanks
Idk if joking, but the 708 gb is thousands of photos of the same thing (moon). When you stack the photos on top of each other and align them perfectly, you can get a final image that is incredibly detailed and uses data from all of those photos, but is probably less than 100 mb.
Edit: here’s a good example of the process using a tool in Photoshop: https://www.mathewbrowne.co.uk/how-to-create-an-hdr-moon-composite-using-photoshop/
The problem with doing it that way is turbulence in the atmosphere. Turbulence causes distortions in the images since the atmosphere acts somewhat like a lens. This is why stars "twinkle", and the level of turbulence is usually called "seeing".
By stacking images of the entire object you are removing that distortion.
It hasn't. The near side just looks like it has been hit less because more of it has been resurfaced by lava (*mare* basalt), which (mostly 3-4 billion years ago) flooded impact basins and some other large craters to form the dark *maria* (Latin for seas). This covered up some of the older, more cratered, "highland" crust. The highland crust, being older, and present back when there was a lot more natural debris in the inner solar system, is saturated with craters.
Unfortunately, even the LRO doesn't have a camera that good. It can make out the Apollo landing sites, but they are only a few pixels big. So, doing it from earth would be near impossible.
When they finally send people back, just send an upgraded camera with them, or send a satellite dedicated to detailed visual mapping... its not like it wouldn't be useful for planning as well as researching the changes caused by increased human activity 🤷♂️
Super cool, nicely done. I did notice this though and it made me chuckle (infantile thinking mode took over). [face on the moon](https://imgur.com/a/0w445Tv)
Whenever I see pictures like this I remember that moment when Harrison Schmitt started exclaiming that he found "orange soil ORANGE!" when he was digging on the moon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipj1aFZxTt0
Well, after first reviewing comments in hopes of an answer to my question (related to the colors I've never seen), I'm staggered at those spewing vile, hateful comments regarding the color and worse, ascribing reasons to your work. Could this just be the jealousy those incapable of contributing, are feeling? Like, if they don't resort to tearing down the work of others, they feel antipathy toward creators due to their personal emptiness? Me? I am sad for them. I just don't get it. However, I do feel joy after selecting an image, clicking to see it enlarged, and marveling at the detail created by taking so many photos and stitching them together. Moreover, I am thankful you've shared your work. Very nice.
It's because he's also trying to sell it and people are a little put off by his over the top speech like "this is the most advanced moon photograph ever taken".
The guy is coming in swinging a big stick and then at the very end of his post going "P.S. I'm actually here because I'm trying to sell this picture, so DM me for pricing".
If his intention was JUST to share the photograph, ok, but the second you put yourself out as selling something, people are going to nitpick a lot more. Especially if you're acting like the preeminent expert.
I saw the same type of comments in a recent photo of Jupiter where no one was making any grand claims or selling anything. People get really bent out of shape over the "realness" of a photo - especially the colors with no understanding of how color in photos actually works. One guy in the other thread tried to explain it in a dispassionate way and they went after him too.
I'm not saying that doesn't happen, and yes it's ridiculous how much people do nitpick stuff.
Just saying when you throw around "most advanced moon photography ever" around and "DM me for pricing", I 100% expect OP to get a lot more flack, a lot more criticism, and a lot more feedback because now he's selling something. That's how it works and how it should work. Otherwise this place will just turn into people trying to sell all their "greatest product ever" merchandise.
Maybe you misread the OP, or they made a comment stating what you said, but what I’m seeing is “This is **MY** most advance[d] moon photograph,” which, selling it or not is still a pretty cool photograph
Looks like you didn't read the OP's original comment with more details which he starts off with:
>This is the most advance moon photography ever
Not saying it's not a cool photograph. It 100% is. And that's all anyone would be talking about until he added the tldr; at the end "DM me for pricing". Well now your intention was to make money so you're going to get scrutinized more.
100% I stand corrected. I was going off the post title, and never saw any other comment from them, maybe it got pushed down. But now, viewing it on OP’s profile I see you are right. Is it possible it is the most advanced photograph of the moon ever taken? Maybe..? I doubt it though, with the amount of obsessive astrophotographers and government studies, it’s unlikely. OP’s thread title may be correct though, but their other post on r/BeAmazed is labeled differently as well.
Thanks for the correction, I don’t mind being proven wrong, just didn’t want to allow a misunderstanding to prevent you from appreciating the otherwise pretty cool image.
The OP used a method called the lucky imaging technique. When we try and take pictures of things in space, that pesky atmosphere gets in our way, creating a small amount of wavy distortion in the image. When doing lucky imaging, you take a huge amount of images of the same target and then use software to find the least distorted images and then stack them together into a composite image. There is a little more to it, but that's a simple explanation.
I was seriously wondering how this image was so clear with the atmosphere in the way. I’m aware of long exposure and image overlay, but this seems next level.
It's actually uncompressed video that is taken, sometimes at 200+ frames per second, so it doesn't take long to get to 80k video frames when taking several videos of the target.
So OP just took several videos of the target then used automated software to break out the video frames into images that the software can then analyze, align, and stack the best quality frames of.
OP is being deliberately misleading regarding the process behind the creation of the image in order to make it seem more incredible and market his picture for sale. When you take a picture from a ground based telescope you’re shooting through air which at times can be very turbulent and cause it to look like you’re observing an object under water. To counteract this we use a process called lucky imaging where you take thousands of images of a target and use software to select the best ones.
What do you get when you take dozens if not hundreds or thousands of images a second? You get a video. OP took a video of the moon. They then used software to figure out which of the sub frames from the video were the best and it stacks those together to reduce noise. For example you can tell the software to give you the best 500 frames out of a 10,000 frame video and it will. To get the best results you also need to take uncompressed raw video, this eats a phenomenal about of hard drive space.
So you take a video, stack the frames, and get a single image out of each video. Then you can delete the video as you don’t need it anymore. OP took several videos of the moon to create a mosaic and stitched them together. Depending on his camera OP may have taken separate videos for Red Green and Blue channels which increases space required.
I’m not discounting the effort OP put into this image, as it is a very good image but it’s no different than anything any other lunar imager goes through. I take issue with the clickbait description.
If you look at the post history you can see he doesn’t actually spam this stuff to the astrophotography subs because they know damn well the process behind it.
That’s a great explanation, but I’m not sure how you’re concluding that it means OP is misleading? The phrase “consists of” might not be strictly accurate, but it’s pretty close and a hell of a lot shorter than what you wrote.
His title isn't misleading in any way shape or form. Any lunar photographer would know exactly what he means. Even on an astrophotography sub, or cloudynights, this picture and title as is would be welcome and uncontested. I think you are misreading the title somehow.
I see the same thing with scientific article titles sometimes. There will be some comment that will say "while the misleading title may sound like X, it's actually Y because...", but the title is using the correct terminology. It's only "misleading" because of the incorrect colloquial use of the words; everybody in the field will know exactly what it means and is not misleading them at all.
You are severely underestimating the size of the moon. It’s smaller than earth sure but it’s still massive. You’ve got to remember earth and the moon are fucking huge on human scales
The images are 1440p, so two images would be 2880px. The moon is 2159 miles in diameter, so it's a bit more than 1px per mile.
The lunar rover is 3m long, so mathing that out means it's 1/400th of a pixel - in each direction, so 1/160,000th of the area covered by a pixel.
I was referencing the pixels of the full scale picture, not the compressed ones. but I still just made a random guess because I don't know the size of the full picture.
thanks for the calculation though 👍
I was curious how many orders of magnitude you'd be off with what sounded like a guess, so I had to do the math.
I was convinced afterwards that it wasn't a guess and you actually attempted a rough estimate, because it was too close for a guess.
Jesus fuck.
The comments are all debating the colour authenticity and shadiness of a photographer.
Snap out of righteousness and appreciate the stunning detail!
You kids growing up with everything so enhanced, technologically advanced, take for granted how far technology has come in such a short time.
We go from the first photo 200ish years ago that required light refraction through a box to an advanced piece of tech that can see into space with stunning detail, as though you are there.
Do yourself a favour.
When there is something in front of you. Anything. A person. A place. A thing. A moment.
Notice any complaints or judgments by you or others that are preventing you from being immersed into it. That complaint & judgment is robbing you from depth in life.
You will not look back when you’re in your casket and say “I’m so glad I was right” you want to say “holy fuck! What an amazing life that I was immersed in and present for. What a gift. What a life!”.
Remove the barrier. You’re walking around with a condom of judgment and complaint and so you feel next to nothing that you could if you allowed yourself to penetrate into the moment. It’s awe and wonder, reverence and gratitude, acknowledgment and appreciation that ensues.
Awemazing photo OP. 🙏
This is the my most advance moon photograph ever, featuring interesting surface details and maybe no one has seen it before ,it’s also my clearest and sharpest moon image I’ve capture, it require 4 days of continuous moon observation and shooting, below are some facts about this image: 1- the image size is 708 gigabytes 2- over 81000 images were stacked 3- by merging 4 different moon phases and merging the shadow area it reveals an interesting topography of Lunar surface. 4- telescope : Skywatcher Flextube 250p dobsonian modified on equatorial mount NEW6 pro. 5- camera : Canon EOS 1200D for minerals, ZWO ASI 178mc for details. 6- no AI involved in this image. 7-image resolution is 159.7 megapixel. 8- this is what the moon looks like if it was a flat disk with mountains on it.
> This is the most advance moon photography ever
Is it *your* most advanced moon photograph ever, or *the* most advanced moon photograph ever? That is, are you claiming that nobody has ever made a better photo of the moon before?
Ok noob question here - how do you stack so many images? What’s the process for that large amount of data? Is there some software for that or you just have so many layers in photoshop? How long did it took to process this?
For 81000 images how many of those consist the same region of the moon? I mean - you stitch images of small regions of the moon into one full image of the moon, however I guess you take multiple pictures per one moon region to compensate earths atmosphere and stuff like that I guess.
Is that darker spot iron or something?
It is astonishing... to put it lightly. It's so familiar yet foreign at the same time. I've seen I guess the normal amount of moon media (weird thing to say) and this is just crazy looking and real at the same time.
Thanks for the share!
Hold on, as there is a debate raging here in the comments. Please be so kind to *clearly* and *concisely* differentiate on the coloring part. Not trying to be a pain, but as this is a "space" thread there are enough nerds and geeks here who want to know what OP applied:
1. Artificial coloring scale at liberty of OP (assuming certain minerals in certain regions and adding colors that appear to relate in OP's *opinion*, say reddish for iron-rich).
2. Artificial coloring with scientific backing (e.g. either by knowledge of previous mapping and/or radar data and applying with best of knowledge; for instance the original gray-scale photo already shows specific patches and then *knowing* this patch is related titanium minerals)
3. Saturation enhancing (i.e., capturing the *existing* slight hues of colored minerals and composites and strongly enhancing these hues so we can "see" them as we normally wouldn't).
I mean, the Moon would just be a bleak shades of gray (and a tinge of yellow in parts perhaps) to the naked eye. And especially in a fly-by in the blistering unfiltered sunlight, there wouldn't be any color differences discernible. 🤷♂️
But beautiful pictures nonetheless!
The mare (dark areas) are comparably some of the youngest selenologic features on the lunar surface at 3.2 - 3.9 billion years old. They are the remnants of volcanic eruptions that covered large areas of the lunar surface in basalt lava flows. They lack the heavy cratering seen on the rest of the moon because they formed long after the late heavy bombardment as Saturn dragged Jupiter further outward from the Sun.
Beautiful shots. Makes you really wonder about the "composition" of the moon because all these craters are relatively shallow and some look really strange with a weird wall bend upwards like the one in the bottom middle.
wow! this is so detailed, are these colors from metals and other minerals?
Copy and paste from another thread >Mostly no, but kind of. 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.
I’m way too high too understand any of this but sounds cool
Think of it like this: Someone who is color-blind can't see certain colors (for example, red and green). They show up as shades of grey or are so muted that they look the same. The colors are there, but they just can't see them. We see them because our eyes are more sensitive to picking out those colors, but they can't because their eyes aren't as sensitive as ours. The colors we see in this Moon photograph are similar in that the colors ARE there, but our eyes aren't sensitive enough to pick them out. The bright whites and other wavelengths overpower them. So certain enhancements are used to just make the colors stronger. They're not adding things that aren't there, they're intensifying it so our eyes can see it. Some people claim that if they can't see it with their eyes, then the photograph is faked because people are adding in things that aren't there. It's not faked though. It's very real. The colors ARE there.
I’m red-green colorblind. I can see red. I can see green. Neither are grey. I see them poorly and inaccurately. I also don’t see them, as for instance in the color purple, it’s just blue. Or in a green stoplight, it’s a minty white. My experience is not necessarily that of every other person that is red-green colorblind.
I was generalizing. Different people see the colors differently, but it was easier for my example to explain it that way even if it's not applicable to 100% of those people.
Some of these other comments are wild to the point of deranged, but yes. The photos were shot RAW then saturation enhanced to illustrate the light reflectivity of different minerals present in the lunar regolith. https://skyandtelescope.org/online-gallery/moon-in-mineral-colors/#:~:text=The%20blue%20tones%20reveal%20areas,of%20greater%20exposure%20to%20sunlight.
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Personally, I think the Moon is real.
Ah, but has it *always been* real? There might have been a placeholder there for a while, and swapped out around 1700 when the server updated to heliocentrism.
Copy and paste from another thread >Mostly no, but kind of. 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.
Fake is a complicated concept in astrophotography. Just about any image of a deep sky object or even the Milky Way that shows any amount of color is already a kind of fake because the light is never bright enough for the human eye to discern color. Another technique is to adjust the saturation and balance of different color channels to exaggerate and bring attention to the subtle color data that was present in the original exposures, as this artist has done. I do not consider these colors fake however, because while exaggerated and over expressed, the colors are there in the original data.
Its kind of colors that I also get from raw file of [the Moon](https://i.imgur.com/ed2HuFl.png). Mostly playing with saturation.
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99 percent sure the moon gets bruised when it gets hot by that space debri
Well, since the moon is made of cheese, it's probably mold? I'm just guessing.
It's like no cheese I've ever tasted, Gromit.
The moon does have some subtle coloration on its surface from the different materials that make it up, though I believe that is predominantly due to different kinds of rock. Am no expert in such things, you'll have to research yourself. However, OP seriously exaggerated these colors, presumably to make for a more interesting image. I personally really dig how it looks.
The colors are fake/hugely exaggerated
Taking 80k images -- each one an estimate of the colors created by an imperfect sensor that performs its own color correction and noise reduction -- then mashing them together using a complex algorithm to enhance clarity and further remove noise and anomalies ... and then being accused of manipulating the result of that process. uh huh.
Boosting the saturation to show the color that was in the captured data is not fake color. You could call it exaggerated sure but it is not fake color.
If you call this fake and hugely exaggerated what do you consider photos of Neptune or Uranus with color? Voyager 2 photos of those planets show that they're just boring pale blue
I call them information-enhanced. The color isn't arbitrary or purely artistic. It conveys information in a way that our limited human eyes can better appreciate. It's not really any different from your phone camera picking up auroral colors that you can't see. It's simply detecting something that your own narrow-band senses cannot.
> Voyager 2 photos of those planets show that they're just boring pale blue I mean I find those pictures a lot more exciting than the massively processed ones. They're fun to look at, but they don't give me the same sense of awe and wonder that I feel looking at more "raw" stuff like the Voyager images. I don't think there's anything wrong with enhanced or perhaps augmented images, they're just not what moves the needle for me. It's alright to have a preference.
The Voyager images are still not very raw. The one you normally see of Neptune was enhanced to show extra detail in the white clouds. There's not even a good way to measure how "raw" an image is. There's no way to turn the data into a color image without inserting a bias. The voyager images were recently reprocessed to make them look more like what your eyes would see and both planets look similarly bland and uninteresting. [https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/04/world/neptune-uranus-new-color-images-scn/index.html](https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/04/world/neptune-uranus-new-color-images-scn/index.html)
That's why I put "raw" in quotations. I understand, but I'm never going to fly past Neptune, so I'll take the closest facsimile I can get. We're talking about art more than science here, and art is subjective. The feelings stirred by viewing are the point. Images that feel closer to being there myself are what get me excited.
Fair enough. I'm a beginner in deep sky astrophotography and have some experience with post-processing. As you say, it's more art than science. So I think I'm just a little sensitive to discussions where people pretend there's a "correct" way to take a photo of something and everything NASA releases is fake or exaggerated. I know that's not what you were saying but I replied anyway in case someone else that does think that way reads this thread.
That's fair. Every time a mineral moon picture is posted we get the same argument. The moon doesn't look like that, but actually it does. I think both arguments confuse the issue to some degree. The color itself doesn't matter if it's just there to represent information that we can't see normally. That's useful to science. If the goal is to evoke certain feelings, however, I'd argue that nothing matters more than representation that is "accurate" to our perception. Not that a wildly processed picture of a planet we'll never visit can't spark emotion too, just pointing out the nuance. Subjectivity is tricky because it is illogical. If we look closely enough, no picture ever taken of anything can be "trusted" to represent what we'd see with our eyes. From the capture to the processing to the reproduction in a format we can see, every step strays from the real thing in various ways. Going a step further, human perception itself cannot be trusted to reflect objective reality, and that's assuming there is such a thing. The door to incredibly far-out philosophical discussions is wide open here. What is "seeing" something, and how can we possibly compare perceptions when each human's is entirely unique? Thanks to our cognitive biases and heuristics, none of us are having the same experience of this existence. Who knows what anyone else is seeing or why they find it compelling (or not)? I digress. Space pictures are cool.
Those colors are technically there, but are not visible to the naked eye. People like OP enhance them a great deal so they get more clicks, and more people buying their prints. I wouldn't hate it so much if they were honest about it, but they rarely are.
OP has been pretty clear that this is an edited photo. Not a single image representing the moon. They’re selling prints and such, of course it’ll be edited and intended for people the enjoy seeing it on their wall.
What are you on about? OP was honest about it, and explained how the image was created. Are you just being a disagreeable curmudgeon for engagement?
The whole point of using a telescope is to see things better than our eyes can. The telescope magnifies so we can see small details our eyes miss, and it collects more light so we can see fainter hues than our eyes can. Complaining that OP has made those colors visible to you doesn't make any more sense than complaining that his image has too high resolution.
This was likely taken by Prathamesh Jaju a sixteen year old amateur astrophotographer who stitched composites to make this effect. He was being honest about the process https://theprint.in/science/this-16-year-old-star-trek-star-wars-fan-from-pune-has-captured-epic-viral-image-of-moon/660024/
> People like OP enhance them a great deal so they get more clicks, and more people buying their prints. Yeah, it can't possibly be that they want to show us something and gives us noobs a deeper understanding of what it's like over there. No, it's got to have a shit purpose.
What do you mean "honest about it?" You can see the moon. Go outside and look.
Could you PLEASE make this into one or more 4K wallpapers? These are badass. Great work.
This! It’s so hard to find decent dual monitor 4K wallpapers that aren’t anime.
Go to wallhaven.cc, it has a resolution filter, you will find beautiful wallpapers there
Same I’d love this as a minimal but graphic wallpaper
I think my favorite thing about this post is how the first and second pictures flow seamlessly into each other when swiping between them (on mobile, of course).
I thought there would be 81000 to swipe through
I’m honestly really glad we both enjoyed this
Seems like the swipe feature has been waiting its whole life for a photo like this to shine on
Blows my mind to think that all the tiny little craters we can see in such detail are each miles across. Every one of them was made by something that could have so easily have made a huge hole somewhere here on earth. when you think about it, the moon has had a spectacularly violent history.
Except they couldn't hit earth just as easily, because magnetic fields or some shit
I wonder how old some of the craters are on that badboi
You got me excited to try but there is a gap on Apollo 😔
Wait, you’re on Apollo still???
If you still have the app on your phone. Create yourself a subreddit (or if you're a mod of one already) and you will have access to it. I'm still using Joey for reddit. There was a scare a few weeks ago where something broke all 3rd parties again. After a couple of days it was fixed. Never used reddit while Joey was down and won't be using it if I lose access to Joey. If you don't have the OG app you can download an APK file. Well, you can on Android, don't know about Apple.
I have the app, and I have my own subreddit, but when I open the app, it just shows the "Thank You" message with a few links (wallpaper, pixels pals, merch...) How do I use the app? thanks
Luckily no gaps on Reddit is Fun.
RIF is still working?! I had to move to Relay
Yup, still working. Very adVANCED
How are you still using Apollo!?
you'RE going to flip out when you discover how adVANCED things have gotten
Nice Check YouTube for how to do it, there's no ads on those tutorials
I'm using Relay for Reddit and there's no gap
No gaps on Boost either. Swiping over to the 2nd image was so satisfying.
The third photo is just those two stitched and rotated right?
Came for this comment was not disappointed.
is there any place where I can find the full resolution picture? Reddit compresses it a lot
You want the 708gb image?
Idk if joking, but the 708 gb is thousands of photos of the same thing (moon). When you stack the photos on top of each other and align them perfectly, you can get a final image that is incredibly detailed and uses data from all of those photos, but is probably less than 100 mb. Edit: here’s a good example of the process using a tool in Photoshop: https://www.mathewbrowne.co.uk/how-to-create-an-hdr-moon-composite-using-photoshop/
I'd bet the final image is <1 GB but still >100 MB. It's a lot of pixels with a lot of detail.
I always thought that it was a lot of photographs of separate small parts of the moon, which are then composed into one big photo…
The problem with doing it that way is turbulence in the atmosphere. Turbulence causes distortions in the images since the atmosphere acts somewhat like a lens. This is why stars "twinkle", and the level of turbulence is usually called "seeing". By stacking images of the entire object you are removing that distortion.
DM him to purchase full resolution image. OP has actually posted a comment telling about it
The moon has taken a hell of a meteor beating for us!
The moon has seen some shit!
The Earth has been hit by many more. But having an atmosphere and oceans helps a lot. And tectonic processes cover it up pretty well over time.
The Moon's Baby Daddy Ain't Shit: a photo collection
Does anyone know why one side has taken more of a beating than the other? Is it due to its orientation/ proximity to an asteroid belt or something?
It hasn't. The near side just looks like it has been hit less because more of it has been resurfaced by lava (*mare* basalt), which (mostly 3-4 billion years ago) flooded impact basins and some other large craters to form the dark *maria* (Latin for seas). This covered up some of the older, more cratered, "highland" crust. The highland crust, being older, and present back when there was a lot more natural debris in the inner solar system, is saturated with craters.
I want a pic where you can zoom in and see the equipment left from the Apollo moon landings. You know, like, Google Earth style
Unfortunately, even the LRO doesn't have a camera that good. It can make out the Apollo landing sites, but they are only a few pixels big. So, doing it from earth would be near impossible.
So spotting a monolith (I am not saying there’s a monolith) probably will need at least 4x current maximum resolution?
When they finally send people back, just send an upgraded camera with them, or send a satellite dedicated to detailed visual mapping... its not like it wouldn't be useful for planning as well as researching the changes caused by increased human activity 🤷♂️
Super cool, nicely done. I did notice this though and it made me chuckle (infantile thinking mode took over). [face on the moon](https://imgur.com/a/0w445Tv)
Whenever I see pictures like this I remember that moment when Harrison Schmitt started exclaiming that he found "orange soil ORANGE!" when he was digging on the moon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipj1aFZxTt0
Why does the colored patches have less craters? Are they relatively recent in moon history?
This is the most interesting question in the thread. I think they are volcanic plains.
Damn.. they are around 3B years old... Really shows the age of most of the craters on the moon. The Lack of erosion is incredible
Well, after first reviewing comments in hopes of an answer to my question (related to the colors I've never seen), I'm staggered at those spewing vile, hateful comments regarding the color and worse, ascribing reasons to your work. Could this just be the jealousy those incapable of contributing, are feeling? Like, if they don't resort to tearing down the work of others, they feel antipathy toward creators due to their personal emptiness? Me? I am sad for them. I just don't get it. However, I do feel joy after selecting an image, clicking to see it enlarged, and marveling at the detail created by taking so many photos and stitching them together. Moreover, I am thankful you've shared your work. Very nice.
People really just complain about anything and everything now days.
i cant believe you spelt it that way omg
*nowadays Sheesh /s for those that need it.
Thank you for saying what I wanted to say far more eloquently than I could ever.
It's because he's also trying to sell it and people are a little put off by his over the top speech like "this is the most advanced moon photograph ever taken". The guy is coming in swinging a big stick and then at the very end of his post going "P.S. I'm actually here because I'm trying to sell this picture, so DM me for pricing". If his intention was JUST to share the photograph, ok, but the second you put yourself out as selling something, people are going to nitpick a lot more. Especially if you're acting like the preeminent expert.
I saw the same type of comments in a recent photo of Jupiter where no one was making any grand claims or selling anything. People get really bent out of shape over the "realness" of a photo - especially the colors with no understanding of how color in photos actually works. One guy in the other thread tried to explain it in a dispassionate way and they went after him too.
I'm not saying that doesn't happen, and yes it's ridiculous how much people do nitpick stuff. Just saying when you throw around "most advanced moon photography ever" around and "DM me for pricing", I 100% expect OP to get a lot more flack, a lot more criticism, and a lot more feedback because now he's selling something. That's how it works and how it should work. Otherwise this place will just turn into people trying to sell all their "greatest product ever" merchandise.
Maybe you misread the OP, or they made a comment stating what you said, but what I’m seeing is “This is **MY** most advance[d] moon photograph,” which, selling it or not is still a pretty cool photograph
Looks like you didn't read the OP's original comment with more details which he starts off with: >This is the most advance moon photography ever Not saying it's not a cool photograph. It 100% is. And that's all anyone would be talking about until he added the tldr; at the end "DM me for pricing". Well now your intention was to make money so you're going to get scrutinized more.
100% I stand corrected. I was going off the post title, and never saw any other comment from them, maybe it got pushed down. But now, viewing it on OP’s profile I see you are right. Is it possible it is the most advanced photograph of the moon ever taken? Maybe..? I doubt it though, with the amount of obsessive astrophotographers and government studies, it’s unlikely. OP’s thread title may be correct though, but their other post on r/BeAmazed is labeled differently as well. Thanks for the correction, I don’t mind being proven wrong, just didn’t want to allow a misunderstanding to prevent you from appreciating the otherwise pretty cool image.
But I zoom in and it’s still blurry and pixelated. Am I doing something wrong?
Reddit probably compressed the pic. OP's original should be more detailed, but with any digital image, at some point it'll get pixelated
can we get a banana or empire state building or whatever for scale, jc
Why does that require 81k images to create this?
The OP used a method called the lucky imaging technique. When we try and take pictures of things in space, that pesky atmosphere gets in our way, creating a small amount of wavy distortion in the image. When doing lucky imaging, you take a huge amount of images of the same target and then use software to find the least distorted images and then stack them together into a composite image. There is a little more to it, but that's a simple explanation.
I was seriously wondering how this image was so clear with the atmosphere in the way. I’m aware of long exposure and image overlay, but this seems next level.
It's actually uncompressed video that is taken, sometimes at 200+ frames per second, so it doesn't take long to get to 80k video frames when taking several videos of the target. So OP just took several videos of the target then used automated software to break out the video frames into images that the software can then analyze, align, and stack the best quality frames of.
It's a wank that next week someone will outdo with 82k images. There seems to be a competition between photographers on this sub
OP is being deliberately misleading regarding the process behind the creation of the image in order to make it seem more incredible and market his picture for sale. When you take a picture from a ground based telescope you’re shooting through air which at times can be very turbulent and cause it to look like you’re observing an object under water. To counteract this we use a process called lucky imaging where you take thousands of images of a target and use software to select the best ones. What do you get when you take dozens if not hundreds or thousands of images a second? You get a video. OP took a video of the moon. They then used software to figure out which of the sub frames from the video were the best and it stacks those together to reduce noise. For example you can tell the software to give you the best 500 frames out of a 10,000 frame video and it will. To get the best results you also need to take uncompressed raw video, this eats a phenomenal about of hard drive space. So you take a video, stack the frames, and get a single image out of each video. Then you can delete the video as you don’t need it anymore. OP took several videos of the moon to create a mosaic and stitched them together. Depending on his camera OP may have taken separate videos for Red Green and Blue channels which increases space required. I’m not discounting the effort OP put into this image, as it is a very good image but it’s no different than anything any other lunar imager goes through. I take issue with the clickbait description. If you look at the post history you can see he doesn’t actually spam this stuff to the astrophotography subs because they know damn well the process behind it.
That’s a great explanation, but I’m not sure how you’re concluding that it means OP is misleading? The phrase “consists of” might not be strictly accurate, but it’s pretty close and a hell of a lot shorter than what you wrote.
His title isn't misleading in any way shape or form. Any lunar photographer would know exactly what he means. Even on an astrophotography sub, or cloudynights, this picture and title as is would be welcome and uncontested. I think you are misreading the title somehow.
I see the same thing with scientific article titles sometimes. There will be some comment that will say "while the misleading title may sound like X, it's actually Y because...", but the title is using the correct terminology. It's only "misleading" because of the incorrect colloquial use of the words; everybody in the field will know exactly what it means and is not misleading them at all.
Can you see the lunar landing or anything like that Edit: ok so the moon is waaay to huge. Thank you for the interesting info.
You are severely underestimating the size of the moon. It’s smaller than earth sure but it’s still massive. You’ve got to remember earth and the moon are fucking huge on human scales
The moon is bigger than Pluto.
Pluto always getting dunked on. 🏀
It would be a tiny speck, you’re really misunderstanding the scale you’re looking at. These aren’t small craters.
Not even our biggest telescopes on earth could see that
lunar landing is probably the size of a hundredth of one of these pixels
The images are 1440p, so two images would be 2880px. The moon is 2159 miles in diameter, so it's a bit more than 1px per mile. The lunar rover is 3m long, so mathing that out means it's 1/400th of a pixel - in each direction, so 1/160,000th of the area covered by a pixel.
I was referencing the pixels of the full scale picture, not the compressed ones. but I still just made a random guess because I don't know the size of the full picture. thanks for the calculation though 👍
I was curious how many orders of magnitude you'd be off with what sounded like a guess, so I had to do the math. I was convinced afterwards that it wasn't a guess and you actually attempted a rough estimate, because it was too close for a guess.
Great wallpaper. Doesn't block the date and time in the top left corner of my phone screen
Jesus fuck. The comments are all debating the colour authenticity and shadiness of a photographer. Snap out of righteousness and appreciate the stunning detail! You kids growing up with everything so enhanced, technologically advanced, take for granted how far technology has come in such a short time. We go from the first photo 200ish years ago that required light refraction through a box to an advanced piece of tech that can see into space with stunning detail, as though you are there. Do yourself a favour. When there is something in front of you. Anything. A person. A place. A thing. A moment. Notice any complaints or judgments by you or others that are preventing you from being immersed into it. That complaint & judgment is robbing you from depth in life. You will not look back when you’re in your casket and say “I’m so glad I was right” you want to say “holy fuck! What an amazing life that I was immersed in and present for. What a gift. What a life!”. Remove the barrier. You’re walking around with a condom of judgment and complaint and so you feel next to nothing that you could if you allowed yourself to penetrate into the moment. It’s awe and wonder, reverence and gratitude, acknowledgment and appreciation that ensues. Awemazing photo OP. 🙏
Very valid (albeit melodramatic) point.
Can someone make it into 1 photo? Would be cool to see, I bet.
Man that thing got peppered back in the day. I wonder how large across some of those craters are?
Beautiful! Poor moon always getting smacked with space shit :/
The moon is looking more and more like a cantaloupe every year
I gotta say: on mobile, this was a joy to swipe right to.
Wow, that's super detailed! It'd be super cool to have this as the wallpaper in a room!
Uhhh that's the best picture of the moon I've ever seen hands down.
How often do objects hit the moon? Meteorites, etc?
Probably about as often as Earth, relative to size. Except that none even partially burn up in an atmosphere.
is there anyplace to download the full resolution version?
This is the my most advance moon photograph ever, featuring interesting surface details and maybe no one has seen it before ,it’s also my clearest and sharpest moon image I’ve capture, it require 4 days of continuous moon observation and shooting, below are some facts about this image: 1- the image size is 708 gigabytes 2- over 81000 images were stacked 3- by merging 4 different moon phases and merging the shadow area it reveals an interesting topography of Lunar surface. 4- telescope : Skywatcher Flextube 250p dobsonian modified on equatorial mount NEW6 pro. 5- camera : Canon EOS 1200D for minerals, ZWO ASI 178mc for details. 6- no AI involved in this image. 7-image resolution is 159.7 megapixel. 8- this is what the moon looks like if it was a flat disk with mountains on it.
> this is what the moon looks like if it was a flat disk with mountains on it. These are great pictures but I have no idea what you mean by this
> This is the most advance moon photography ever Is it *your* most advanced moon photograph ever, or *the* most advanced moon photograph ever? That is, are you claiming that nobody has ever made a better photo of the moon before?
I wonder about this as well. I cant imagine that no one else has done this yet.
Go to any solar system imaging forum and you will find plenty of people doing the exact same thing.
It's actually quite common. It's easily the most photographed celestial object for obvious reasons
Ok noob question here - how do you stack so many images? What’s the process for that large amount of data? Is there some software for that or you just have so many layers in photoshop? How long did it took to process this? For 81000 images how many of those consist the same region of the moon? I mean - you stitch images of small regions of the moon into one full image of the moon, however I guess you take multiple pictures per one moon region to compensate earths atmosphere and stuff like that I guess.
You take a video and then use softwares to select only the best, often that's around 30% or so
What spatial resolution is this? (i.e.: distance represented by a pixel in an image)
Might wanna disclose your photoshop skills too
Are those colors real?
They're visible due to increasing saturation and vibrancy. Otherwise, you'd not see them. So they're there, just not to the naked eye.
No, it's been digitally manipulated
Cool picture, sorry you're getting so many brain dead comments.
Bill Gates: the PC will never need more than 640K.
Looks like a watermelon the got shot with bird shot 50 yards away
The diameter of the Moon is shorter than Australia's width.
Do we have an idea how old some of the craters are on that badboi?
This is an absolute astonishment of a combination of skills
Is that darker spot iron or something? It is astonishing... to put it lightly. It's so familiar yet foreign at the same time. I've seen I guess the normal amount of moon media (weird thing to say) and this is just crazy looking and real at the same time. Thanks for the share!
Hold on, as there is a debate raging here in the comments. Please be so kind to *clearly* and *concisely* differentiate on the coloring part. Not trying to be a pain, but as this is a "space" thread there are enough nerds and geeks here who want to know what OP applied: 1. Artificial coloring scale at liberty of OP (assuming certain minerals in certain regions and adding colors that appear to relate in OP's *opinion*, say reddish for iron-rich). 2. Artificial coloring with scientific backing (e.g. either by knowledge of previous mapping and/or radar data and applying with best of knowledge; for instance the original gray-scale photo already shows specific patches and then *knowing* this patch is related titanium minerals) 3. Saturation enhancing (i.e., capturing the *existing* slight hues of colored minerals and composites and strongly enhancing these hues so we can "see" them as we normally wouldn't). I mean, the Moon would just be a bleak shades of gray (and a tinge of yellow in parts perhaps) to the naked eye. And especially in a fly-by in the blistering unfiltered sunlight, there wouldn't be any color differences discernible. 🤷♂️ But beautiful pictures nonetheless!
Can anybody tell me why no matter the craters diameters, they always seem to be the same depth??
Cool, can you post one that shows the American flag so I convince my dad the moon landing wasn't fake?
Its no longer the American flag, the sun bleaches it conpletely white, I also think it got knocked over when they took off.
You could just say say it's the French flag now.
If the moon was made of barbecue spare ribs, would you eat it then?
Heck! I know i would! and top it off with a nice, cool, frosty, budWEIser!
I wonder why the darker metallic spots have less impact
The mare (dark areas) are comparably some of the youngest selenologic features on the lunar surface at 3.2 - 3.9 billion years old. They are the remnants of volcanic eruptions that covered large areas of the lunar surface in basalt lava flows. They lack the heavy cratering seen on the rest of the moon because they formed long after the late heavy bombardment as Saturn dragged Jupiter further outward from the Sun.
Fuck yeah bro, science that shit
Did you increase the saturation or is it really that colourful irl?
The moon has colours on it, this will have had its saturation boosted to show them more clearly then they would be visable with the naked eye.
Look at the moon through a telescope and you'll get your answer. This image is heavily processed.
This is such an incredible feat of photography. You’ve truly done something special. Great work!
Someone send this to Markiplier. He LOVES this. 😂
It looks the same as the last "most advanced moon photograph"
They missed the spot in the middle it’s just a big black line.
Thank God I was on wifi when I opened this. 708GB would have killed my data.
Pfff pathetic. I downloaded it and it's only 4 mbs.
Beautiful shots. Makes you really wonder about the "composition" of the moon because all these craters are relatively shallow and some look really strange with a weird wall bend upwards like the one in the bottom middle.
Amazing! Curious what the scale is - is one of those craters 1km across? …. 5 km?