Stunning Artemis II photos reveal the moon’s hidden colors

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]If you were following along with the Artemis 2 mission, you may remember this moment.

[00:00:04]>> That's had greenish hues to me and was very unique. I didn't see anything like that anywhere else on this side of the moon.

[00:00:10]>> Well, astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy just teamed up with Captain Reid Wiseman to release these incredible photos that give us a closer look at those colors on the moon. These images are hyper-saturated, which basically means that McCarthy stacked a bunch of photos that Wiseman took while flying around the far side of the moon, and then balanced and boosted those colors to reveal geographical details that we normally can't see. So, because the moon is moving and the spacecraft is also moving, a single image usually ends up with a bunch of visual noise, like blurry spots, lost detail, or little distortions. But, by layering tons of images together and filtering out that noise with software, they were able to achieve much clearer and sharper images like these. And once you isolate that color information, the moon starts looking very different from the gray orb we see on Earth. So, in this picture of Mare Orientale, the hyper-saturation reveals these orange pockets that are likely to be tinged by iron oxide. And also this blue area that is probably full of titanium-rich basalt.