Far side moon photos reveal hidden lunar minerals in brilliant color
May 22, 2026
2 min reading
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Stunning Artemis II photos reveal the hidden colors of the moon
An astrophotographer joined forces with Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman to create these stunning new images of the lunar surface
The Far Side of the Moon, consisting of a stack of approximately 30 photographs taken by Artemis II Mission Commander Reid Wiseman with a Nikon Z9.
NASA astronaut and Artemis II Mission Commander Reid Wiseman and an astrophotographer teamed up to create stunning, hypersaturated color images of the Moon. The photographs reveal previously unseen details of its surface.
When NASA Artemis II The crew made their historic flyby around the far side of the Moon in April, viewing the gray, pockmarked lunar surface from the windows of their capsule. One of the goals of the mission was to capture extensive photographic data, and during and after the spaceflight, NASA released unprecedented views of the Moon. Today, the space agency’s image team is still sorting and processing the tens of thousands of images captured during the mission. Many of them are amazing, but they all are a little bit gray.
The dark side of the moon, enhanced in color to reveal minerals and impact craters.
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Fortunately, cosmic photographer Andrew McCarthy worked with Mission Commander Wiseman before launch, teaching the astronaut how to get the right kind of raw photographs on which he could work magic.
“I thought it would be a really good opportunity to create photos that were maybe a little less scientific and a little more artistic,” McCarthy says.
McCarthy’s work had already caught Wiseman’s attention on social media. And in the weeks leading up to the launch, the two men worked together to plan how to capture bursts of photographs of the far side of the Moon, sometimes a hundred at a time. “I don’t really think about reproducing what my eyes see; I look for hidden details; I look for hidden colors,” says McCarthy.
An image of the far side of the moon composed of approximately 100 photographs with colors enhanced to reveal meteorite craters and mineral composition.
McCarthy’s hypersaturated images are made by stacking bursts of photographs Wiseman took of the far side of the moon, then balancing the colors and adjusting their relative saturations, revealing subtle changes in terrain. And the results are downright breathtaking.
A photograph of a moving object (the moon) taken from a moving vantage point (the spacecraft) contains a lot of “noise,” meaning that there are often many out-of-focus areas or places where detail has been lost because the camera has moved relative to its target. By stacking many photographs and using computer software to filter out noise, photographers can achieve a smoother, artifact-free version of the image.
The lunar surface near Mare Orientale was enhanced with hypersaturation of color, revealing minerals such as orange pockets of iron oxide.
This technique allows the photographer to isolate the color information captured in the image. Increasing the color saturation reveals more information about the moon’s topography: The red that emerges is most likely iron oxide, and the blues are titanium-rich basalt, McCarthy says.
“I’m trying to bring them out to get people excited and help them see our Moon as more than just a dusty gray rock… like the geological gold mine that it is,” he says.
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