Our grey moon.

reply to post by theability


Thats's prety impresive I didn't know they were already that advanced in taking pictures back then. ( Sorry I really don't know anything about camaras except for the one on my mobile. )

reply to post by Sinter Klaas

Advanced film photography yes. The Lunar Orbiter missions used kind of a brute force method but it worked very well. And not with a Hasselblad.
astrogeology.usgs.gov...

Good stuff but the LROC is getting much higher resolution images.

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
Now we have a Moon which always looks grey. I've seen one coloured picture and I read somewhere it was a hoax and someone added the colour himself.

My question.

Why do we always see a gray Moon. Even with state of the art NASA equipment it seems they saved money when they bought the cameras taking the pictures. Why ?

I'm not sure I understand the question like "Why do we always see a gray Moon". Look, NASA has little to do with it. On a crisp cloudless night, you don't need a multi-million dollar camera to ascertain the color characteristics of that celestial body. NASA or no NASA.

It's like asking "why sand always looks like sand?"

I've been to desert in a few remote locations and sure enough, it can look pretty dull

[edit on 9-4-2010 by buddhasystem]

reply to post by Phage


i don't know how old he is. late 60's maybe?

you should read "penetration". yeah, i know you are the God of the skeptics and all (it is well earned, and a compliment ) but it is a good book that is half wild story, and half good information from a participant in a very intriguing set of experiments.

reply to post by Sinter Klaas


Well we need to remember that I am speaking of Emulsion not CCD or digital, big difference.

You have negative film, reversal film like slides, color [red green blue]. So all these films have resolving power, that is effected by emulsion composition and processing techniques, and chemicals used.

And you say good evening, then gooday!

reply to post by Phage


The brute force method was quite ingenius!!!

I like how they used film, developed it on board the orbitors and then scanned the images back to earth, AWESOME technology in the 60's!

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
Now we have a Moon which always looks grey. I've seen one coloured picture and I read somewhere it was a hoax and someone added the colour himself.

My question.

Why do we always see a gray Moon. Even with state of the art NASA equipment it seems they saved money when they bought the cameras taking the pictures. Why ?

I'm not sure I understand the question like "Why do we always see a gray Moon". Look, NASA has little to do with it. On a crisp cloudless night, you don't need a multi-million dollar camera to ascertain the color characteristics of that celestial body. NASA or no NASA.

It's like asking "why sand always looks like sand?"

I've been to desert in a few remote locations and sure enough, it can look pretty dull

[edit on 9-4-2010 by buddhasystem]

So, when i look up into the sky and see the sky is a pale blue, i can assume that space is the same color?

I guess we can stop spending all that money on exploration, huh? LOL

The atmosphere scatters light the same, be it night or day. We can say that the moon appears grey, from Earth. But, from Mars the Earth appears blue. Thank God it isn't....i don't like living in a pineapple under the sea.

The only way to know what the moon looks like is to take true color images of it while standing there, and then bring them home. Not some fancy, multi spectrum camera. Just take a regular camera and snap pictures, so we know that the colors are calibrated to what we are accustomed to.

I find it odd that NASA cannot find it in their budget to strap a 200 dollar camera to their various devices used for imaging, just to provide us with proof that the colors are accurate.

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
Now we have a Moon which always looks grey. I've seen one coloured picture and I read somewhere it was a hoax and someone added the colour himself.

My question.

Why do we always see a gray Moon. Even with state of the art NASA equipment it seems they saved money when they bought the cameras taking the pictures. Why ?

I'm not sure I understand the question like "Why do we always see a gray Moon". Look, NASA has little to do with it. On a crisp cloudless night, you don't need a multi-million dollar camera to ascertain the color characteristics of that celestial body. NASA or no NASA.

It's like asking "why sand always looks like sand?"

I've been to desert in a few remote locations and sure enough, it can look pretty dull

[edit on 9-4-2010 by buddhasystem]

So, when i look up into the sky and see the sky is a pale blue, i can assume that space is the same color?

I guess we can stop spending all that money on exploration, huh? LOL

The atmosphere scatters light the same, be it night or day. We can say that the moon appears grey, from Earth. But, from Mars the Earth appears blue. Thank God it isn't....i don't like living in a pineapple under the sea.

The only way to know what the moon looks like is to take true color images of it while standing there, and then bring them home. Not some fancy, multi spectrum camera. Just take a regular camera and snap pictures, so we know that the colors are calibrated to what we are accustomed to.

I find it odd that NASA cannot find it in their budget to strap a 200 dollar camera to their various devices used for imaging, just to provide us with proof that the colors are accurate.

Originally posted by bigfatfurrytexan
So, when i look up into the sky and see the sky is a pale blue, i can assume that space is the same color?

I guess we can stop spending all that money on exploration, huh? LOL

The atmosphere scatters light the same, be it night or day. We can say that the moon appears grey, from Earth. But, from Mars the Earth appears blue. Thank God it isn't....i don't like living in a pineapple under the sea.

Our atmosphere does scatter light, but not to the extent that objects assume a totally different color. We both know you are being facetious here. A red traffic light would still look red when observed in normal conditions through a telescope form 10 miles away (and that's about the thickness of atmosphere).

I've been at high elevations like summit Mt.McKinley (roughly 50% of remaining atmosphere), and the moon still looks damn gray. Sorry dude, you argument is quite weak.

reply to post by buddhasystem


it isn't an argument.

The light scattering is only part of the effect. The other part that i referred to is the blurring of colors due to distance.

Our "blue" planet, if completely blue, would not be able to host the human population.

Originally posted by bigfatfurrytexan
The other part that i referred to is the blurring of colors due to distance.

What's that supposed to mean and how is it different from scattering?

(hint: it's not)





[edit on 9-4-2010 by buddhasystem]

reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan

No.
You can't assume space is the same color because there are not enough molecules in space to produce the Raleigh scattering which causes our sky to be blue.

Yes, the scattering occurs day or night but there isn't much light at night so the sky looks...well, dark. (It has something to do with being night time). But the blue of Raleigh scattering is a cumulative effect of looking at a lot of air with a lot of light bouncing around in it. It's not like a blue light, casting blue light on objects. The light which gets to us from the Sun is white (pretty much so) because the air it's coming through is very transparent and does not absorb any visible wavelengths to an appreciable degree.

Yep, Earth can look blue from space because there's a lot of water here. A lot more water than land and the land usually is covered by a quite a bit of cloud. What color do you get when you mix blue and white? The Moon looks gray because it is mostly gray. Mars looks red because it is mostly red. Venus looks very white because it is covered in clouds. To the naked eye, planets show us an average of their varied colors.

We actually do have very good images from the surface of the Moon, in 70mm color film. Hard to beat that for true color.

If you're talking about images from Mars, the colors are not "accurate". They can't be and nobody claims that they are, the wrong wavelengths are used. They are a best guess. But the scientists who use the images don't really care what color Mars is, they care about the minerals that can be found. Infrared provides a lot more information about that than visible light does.


[edit on 4/9/2010 by Phage]

reply to post by buddhasystem


Well lets see. Maybe I get Nasa in on it because they actualy went to the moon and took the pictures

Reply to Bigfatfurrytexan and Buddahsystem.

You should also read the reply posts.

Jazz10 posted a video explaining everything with a little surprise at the end.
And Phage posted a picture.

Take a look.

[edit on 9-4-2010 by Sinter Klaas]

reply to post by Phage


I think you misunderstood my sarcasm.

But, like i said, the whole matter would be put to rest if NASA would just follow the lead of that Joe Blow regular citizen in the UK: buy a cheap camera and put it to use.

reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan

A big problem with the interweb.

I don't think "convince people that we are not hoaxers" is in NASA's mission statement.

Originally posted by Phage
I don't think "convince people that we are not hoaxers" is in NASA's mission statement.

Well said!

A famous Soviet cosmonaut, V.Sevastianov, recently passed away. According to people who knew him very well, he would get very angry when questioned by hoax theorists, specifically about the US lunar program. He said something in private that sounded like "We drank vodka with those American fellas (astronauts) many times and we told each other stuff that no intelligence agency on Earth has any clue about, and I sure as hell know that they went to the moon all right" (my translation)

[edit on 9-4-2010 by buddhasystem]

reply to post by Phage

We actually do have very good images from the surface of the Moon, in 70mm color film. Hard to beat that for true color.

And what great color images they are!

Well, here's a picture of the Moon from the ISS:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/629ab9c6e4e8.jpg[/atsimg]

Guess what?

reply to post by Saint Exupery


It looks like the ISS is still well within Earths atmosphere.