But how did they composite 81,000 images without worrying about atmospheric lensing distorting the proportions as it moved across the sky for 4 days? Is it just negligible?
The Samsung moon actually just makes up a plausible looking moon, which is hilarious given that the moon essentially doesn’t change, so they could have just overlayed reference images. Instead, you get features on the moon that don’t exist.
They didn’t. What they did was take 81,000 images and then filter through, them taking the best images of each region of the Moon and then averaging and compositing those.
It isn’t 81k images stitched together. It’s 81k images taken in the hopes of getting enough with perfect clarity to create the composite.
Knowing what I know, I am assuming this image was standardised and then normalised (fancy stats algos to keep things in the same visual range) while stitching it together, and the final product enhanced a lot of colouration (saturation). They’re subtle or undetectable to the naked eye, but they exist. They are reflected in the different minerals present. I’ve done this stuff (raster stitching) with different imagery. Op was active in the comments with info, but I didn’t read up on it.
The colors don’t match what a human eye would see, but without going into a philosophy tangent, color is extremely complex and a huge part of what a human sees is your brain doing representations and mapping that isn’t perfectly represented in the physical object being observed. In this photo the saturation has been increased (versus a human eye) because it helps show the geological differences on the lunar surface. The reddish areas are high in iron and feldspar, and the blue-tinted zones have higher titanium content. Instead of thinking of the color as “real” or “fake” it’s probably better to think of it as a tool, to simulate if you were a super human with the ability to adjust saturation and detect metal composition with your eye. Usually when a photo like this is shared by researchers and scientist all this nuance and exposition is included, but then journalist and social media get a hold of it and people start crying “fake” without an understanding of what the image is trying to accomplish. TL;DR - The image isn’t what a human eye would see but it isn’t just art to look cool, the color and modifications have physical meaning and serve a purpose.
I imagine the yellowish tinted areas are mostly sulfur from volcanic ash emissions. That middle picture, in the section between the two mare, it looks like how beach sand is altered after being inundated with water. In general, most of the surface looks like pulverized sand on a beach, at a high level abstracted perspective view. That one section between the mare looks whetted by comparison. Perhaps ash altered the consistency enough to create a similar type of compacted appearance, but if there was water and vulcanism in the area, perhaps that was the Lunar version of Yellowstone.
Funny that the most recent research on the anomalous regions inside the Earth’s mantle have now been linked to the Theia collision through the mantle hotspot activity. So it is likely that the moon and Yellowstone are directly linked. It would be interesting to find that the regional anomalies on the moon are likewise of a similar origin. It would be interesting to me if Yellowstone’s doppelganger is right there in plain sight as well.
Higher speed impacts penetrate deep, but also cause the rock to melt. This fills in deeper craters, limiting the max depth a crater can be. There are still very deep huge craters, but these look more like big depressions than craters, because of how big they are. They are also themselves covered with craters usually, making their size and shape harder to see.
Because the diameter of the moon is 3474km, a difference of several kilometers would only amount to a fraction of a percent. So even though one crater is for example 10km deeper than another, relative to the size of the moon this is practically nothing. When viewing pics like these where the whole moon is visible, this matters.
The moon is a very uniform gray color and lacks the indicators our brain use to gauge depth. This makes it very hard to guess how deep the different craters are. You can see some craters have more shadows where others don’t, but they are also different shapes and sizes and the lighting is different so it’s hard to see.
There is also probably some part of the speeds of incoming stuff being within a certain range and the moonrocks being relatively uniform in materials, so the range of craters than can exists is probably limited. But I’m not certain how big of an factor this is and what the range is.
There are plenty of missions right now. China has landed a rover on the moon this month. And multiple countries have satellites in orbit around the moon. Nasa has their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which takes very high resolution images of the moon all the time and these are publiced on their website.
This image does a good job at making me realize we have explored basically nothing on the moon. SO much more to explore, yet we act like there’s no point trying to send more astronauts to the moon for decades. Please, increase NASA budget more.
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