Mike Salway

Why does the picture of the Moon above have those funky colours? You can’t see them with your eyes, or through the telescope like that, right?

Actually the colours are real – they’ve just been artificially boosted; amplified during processing. The colours themselves represent the various types of iron and mineral deposits on the Moon. The blue hues reveal titanium rich areas while orange and purple colors show regions relatively poor in titanium and iron.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to process your lunar images to bring out those colours. I’ll talk a little about the equipment and capture, but most of the article will focus on the image processing.