Russell Croman likes to play around with color. Here he has taken one of his Moon photos and enhanced the natural colors to tease them out.

"I've always been fascinated by the subtle colors of the lunar surface," Croman told SPACE.com. "For this shot I took full aesthetic license in enhancing them."

Images of deep space objects, such as nebulas, are routinely enhanced, both by time exposures and often by applying colors to black and white images taken in the various wavelength bands of light. The reality is many distant objects are so wispy and vague that the human eye could rarely see much color, even if you were right there. It's not that astronomers make colors up, but they do often manipulate images to make the colors stronger.

Infrared and X-ray images always must be converted to false visible-light colors to make a palettable image.

The colors in the Moon image are real, in a sense, Croman explained.

"To bring out the differences between the various regions, the color saturation has been greatly enhanced," he explained. "The hues are correct."

Differences in color on the lunar surface indicate different ages and types of materials. Croman offers prints of this and other space images here.

-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: Russell Croman