October 19, 2012
Tinted
image by Maximilian Teodorescu, Dumitrana (Ilfov), Romania
With color enhancing goggles the Moon tells additional tales. Unfortunately, such goggles don't exist, but Max's imaging and processing - described here - highlight very faint differeneces in hues that must be due to slight changes in chemical composition. All the maria are blue with brightening where rays cross, and the freshest rays and craters are lighter and brighter blue. Bright young highland craters such as Proclus are not blue. The highlands are reddish-orange, turning colorless near the terminator which minimizes albedo. The orange just inside Crisium's west rim emphasizes the bench of highland material covered only with thin layers of lavas. The nearby mare ridge marks an abrupt lowering of the surface and Apollo radar data showed that a buried fault dropped the inner part of the maria down lower than the bench area.
Chuck Wood
Technical Details
C 11 telescope working at F/10, DBK 41 AU02.AS camera with IR-pass filter (685nm). The color data were extracted from IR data via Photoshop, then inverted and applied onto the greyscale version of the final image. Processing was done with Registax 6, AstraImage, Microsfot ICE and Photoshop CS2.
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