The Moon of 25-02-2026

Recently I realized that throughout 2025 I had not taken a single photograph of the Moon. Even during the lunar eclipse, I limited myself to observing through binoculars, but I don’t regret that at all! This past Wednesday however the sky cleared for several hours, and the Moon rose beautifully above my balcony like it always does. It was the perfect moment to return to lunar imaging once more.

Back in October 2024, when I last photographed the Moon, I experimented with making a mineral moon by saturating the colours of the image. The goal was to reveal the subtle blue and orange hues caused by variations in lunar surface composition. Unfortunately the result was far from ideal. Instead of distinct mineral regions, the image had a lot of unnatural purple and green gradients. Today I finally discovered the source of that issue. The colour gradients were introduced by the program I use to center individual frames before stacking: Planetary Imaging PreProcessor (PIPP). Because the Moon was already well centered in this recent dataset, I decided to skip that preprocessing step and proceed directly to stacking. The difference was immediately apparent.

When I increased the color saturation this time, the familiar green and purple gradients were nowhere to be seen. Instead delicate blue hues and slightly orange colours were revealed from the data, shwoing the Moon’s authentic mineral regions. It appears that PIPP, while extremely useful for planetary imaging where centering is essential, subtly altered the colour balance in my earlier workflow.

Going forward, I will likely reserve PIPP primarily for planetary data. In those cases, extreme colour saturation adjustments are rarely necessary anyway. Sometimes,the smallest changes in processing order can make the difference between artificial colour artifacts and a faithful representation of the subtle chemistry written across the lunar surface.