If we look at the Moon again and ask ourselves what its true color is, we would think that it is white, since it is the color that distance and our eyes allow us to see, and if we add to this imagination the narrative that the Moon is of cheese, much whiter we imagine it. But reality is much less flat than this, the truth is that the Moon has more than one color, it is a paradise of ranges that range from white, through gray, ocher and even blue that have been revealed thanks to a new photography that shows us what it really is like.
Image: Andrew McCarthy and Connor Matherme
The true colors of the Moon
Andrew McCarthy and Connor Matherme are the astrophotographers behind this work, with which they seek to pay tribute to the Artemis 1 mission that will take off on August 29 from Florida, if no inconvenience interferes with the agenda. Artemis Phase I will finally lift off from the launch pad and mark the beginning of humanity’s return to the Moon. And in celebration of the great exploration event, the photographers have called their work “The Hunt for Artemis.”
This image of the Moon is composed of more than 200,000 black and white photos that McCarthy took from Arizona at the same time that Matherme, who specialized in photos of the Moon, took 500 photographs from Louisiana, in which he focused on color information instead of surface details.
The photograph published on the official Instagram accounts of both photographers is accompanied by the legend: “the most ridiculously detailed image of the Moon that we could create, the result is this 174 megapixel shot.”
The two photographers worked on this work for two years, and it is thanks to their great work and effort that today we can see the true color of the Moon. The real tones are softer and more muted, but in the photograph, McCarthy and Matherme have enhanced and saturated them so that the human eye can perceive them with the naked eye.
Image: Andrew McCarthy and Connor Matherme
McCarthy and Matherme have explained how they managed to take this photograph, and you will be surprised to know that they did not use any unusual equipment as they only used conventional cameras and an astronomical positioning tracker so that the cameras followed the position of the Moon.