Moon In Clolor. high saturation Photo.

To all the posters asking "Why can't I see the moon in color through my telescope?" As an avid amateur astronomer myself, and I'm sure you are as well, all of you should know that telescopes we look through at the moon and the planets/nebulae are all in black and white, there is no color in a telescope. The color you see is all done through imaging and image processing to create the color.

That is all.

That is why you can't see any color in the moon

Originally posted by Cds4344

.....there is no color in a telescope.

You sure about that, mate? Aren't binoculars just another version of a telecope?? Two, mated together. Sheesh! I guess all those avid birdwatchers are imagining the pretty colors they see in the feathers?


Everything about the folklore of the Blue Moon phenomenom can be found via that link.

[edit on 18 August 2009 by weedwhacker]

reply to post by Cds4344


There are no black & white lens and mirrors, so a telescope cannot be black & white.

Lens let all visible (and some that we cannot see) light pass through them and mirrors reflect all the visible (and some that we cannot see) light.

Unless you are talking about imaging devices connected to telescopes, those can be colour or black & white.

Originally posted by Cds4344
As an avid amateur astronomer myself, and I'm sure you are as well, all of you should know that telescopes we look through at the moon and the planets/nebulae are all in black and white, there is no color in a telescope. The color you see is all done through imaging and image processing to create the color.

You may be a bit confused...it sounds like you are talking about digital cameras.

All digital cameras (the ones used by average people, professionals, and even on NASA spacecraft) are actually "color blind". What I mean by that is that the sensor that picks up the image (the "CCD" or "CMOS") can only discern different shades of gray. The sensor does not know one color from the next.

When a picture is taken with a digital camera, special filters create an image (actually multiple images seen through multiple filters) in differing intensities of gray. Each color when viewed through various filters becomes various -- but specific -- shades of gray. The camera's computer than takes the multiple images as seen through the various filters and assigns a color to the shades of gray.

The resulting color image takes less than a second and is actually the camera's "best educated guess" at what the actual colors probably are.

NASA's Mars Rovers are like this, but they take many black and white pictures of the same scene, with separate pictures of different vesions of that scene viewed though different filters. The rover then sends all of those black-and-white pictures of that scene (each picture slightly different shades of gray) back to Earth where imaging scientists use computers on Earth to make that "best educated guess" as to the actual color, based on the different black-and-white filtered photos.

Each slightly different black and white image of a particular scene taken through different filters can be used to identify certain -- but not all -- colors. These black and white images are then electronically "stacked" to build up a full "approximate true color" picture.

That's why the raw images from Mars are in black-and-white -- because the imaging computers here on Earth have not yet translated the pictures into approximate true color. The "raw images" picked up by your personal digital camera's sensor is black and white also -- but the camera's computer almost instantaneously translates it into color.


[edit on 8/18/2009 by Soylent Green Is People]

Nice! S&F. I started a thread on this a few months ago:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Here is a link to a nice large photo of the moon with it's "colors":

www.rc-astro.com...

I'm guessing that I got a little confused, and/or was talking about something different. 2 hours of sleep will do that to a person

Originally posted by sunspot0
maybe it looks gray because of the sun,the moon has no atmosphere so the suns glare is immense,the same happens when you overexpose a camera?just a thought though

cheers

The moon has an atmosphere...very small one albeit.Anyhoo cool pic! need to get myself a telescope,too damn expensive for a good one though.

Originally posted by Cds4344
To all the posters asking "Why can't I see the moon in color through my telescope?" As an avid amateur astronomer myself, and I'm sure you are as well, all of you should know that telescopes we look through at the moon and the planets/nebulae are all in black and white, there is no color in a telescope.

I think what you're talking about is the fact that humans see in black & white when we're only using our rods for vision, as happens with very dim objects in a telescope like nebulae and galaxies. Images of deep space show color because cameras collect light over a long period of time and filter it through red/green/blue filters either placed in front of a greyscale chip, or built into each pixel in an array. Human limitations of color perception in a telescope only apply to dim objects, not to the moon which is quite bright in any telescope. Even planets show color, though perhaps not as vividly as they do in most images, and some who have looked through my scope do report great difficult seeing any color at all in planets; perhaps it requires some practice to be sensitive to the lower limit of your cones' perception, I don't know for sure, but I do know that I can see color in the cloud bands on Jupiter and the rust tint of Mars without difficulty. The moon however, is much brighter and would definately show color to your eye if it were noticeable, practiced or not.

[edit on 19-8-2009 by ngchunter]