The Mineral Flower Moon

Here is the Mineral Flower Moon!

What's a Mineral Moon?

Due to an interesting quirk of nature, light that's reflected off different materials reflect very slightly different colours, so you can take a picture and do some colour trickery to bring them out and then you can tell what a thing is made of! Our eyes aren't sensitive enough to differentiate these colours normally so the moon usually just looks like a whiteish/greyish disc, but here the true colours of the moon can be seen!

In this picture the bluer areas are deposits of Titanium rich basalt formed from younger volcanic lava flows, the orange/brown areas are older space-weathered regolith rich in Iron which gives it kind of a rusty look, and the yellowish areas are glassy ejected material from fresh impact craters.

What's a Flower Moon?

Well simply it is just the first full moon of may, there is nothing else special about it haha. But I kinda cheated a lil bit and the moon here is only 97% full as there was going to be too much cloud cover to get it at 100% 🥲

How I made it:

This picture was taken with a smartphone pointed though the eyepiece of an 8" dobsonian telescope by extracting 1800 pictures from the frame data of 3 10 second long videos. Then all the images are stacked on top of each other and processed together to produce a single higher quality picture. To get the "mineral moon" effect the picture is run through imaging editing software to raise and lower the saturation of the colour channels and repeated until the colours are revealed. The picture here is a lower resolution version of the original.