The lunar surface is rich with titanium, iron and other minerals but you would never know it looking at most photos or even looking directly at it. The sunlight reflection coming off the moon is so intense, it causes most photos to appear over exposed or just shows shades of gray.

It’s possible to capture high enough resolution lunar images, either natively or via image stacking techniques, to pull subtle mineral colors out of the sea of gray. The faint colors in my moon shot is light reflecting off lunar surface mineral deposits. The hint of blue in the dark areas of the lunar maria is from light reflecting off titanium and subtle rust colored areas is light reflects off iron and other minerals.

It’s possible to get a much higher resolution mineral moon shot compared to the shot I posted using a telescope or stacking lots of high resolution dSLR or mirrorless images together. For the image I posted, I wasn’t using an auto-tracking astro mount, just a fixed tripod, so I only used a single, high resolution uncompressed 100 MB RAW file to process the image. One of these days I might go to the effort to shoot a tracked, stacked trophy shot for a wall hanger.


Wonder how long until we’ll have a TV version of Gold Rush on the moon? Would you tune into Moon Mining or Alien Base Hunters? I suspect one day both will be streaming.

The race is already well underway. Guess who the players are?

(Very cool pic.)

Wow great pic!