Why is the moon greyish black?

Align · November 2008

<div class="IPBDescription">There are plenty of minerals with interesting colours</div>Wasn't sure if this should be put here or in off-topic since it's more of a science question (though meant seriously) than an actual discussion. Feel free to correct me.
Anyway, yeah. Topic title & description says it all. In pictures of moon landings as well as from the surface here, the moon is entirely monochrome. Is it just that the lightest minerals happen to be these boring colours?

lolfighter · November 2008

Quite likely, yes.

TychoCelchuuu · November 2008

Wikipedia has a nice article on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rocks" target="_blank">moon rocks</a> that explains it pretty well. The moon happens to be made of gray stuff. If you look at something like Mars, you can see that planets can be all sorts of colors. Just because you find the moon "boring" doesn't make it special in any way: gray is not inherently more boring than red or green or blue.

juice · November 2008

You are supposed to be sleeping at night, therefore why should the moon be pretty?

pSyk0mAn · November 2008

It isn't supposed to be pretty, but it's at least supposed to be yellow with all that cheese on there. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/nerd-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::nerdy::" border="0" alt="nerd-fix.gif" />

ImpatientJedi · April 2013

The moon is made from the same stuff the Earth is if you believe in the leading theory of how the moon was formed. For the white and dark spots, the dark spots are ancient lava seas. I don't know about the white rocks but from my opinion they would be from exposure from the sun with out protection like an atmosphere to protect or erode the rock over time.

Sinistral_on_Steam · April 2013

I think it's just the color of the moon surface - I'm thinking it's mostly just space rocks with a greyish color on the lunar surface. When reflected back to earth from the sun's light I believe it appears more whitish due to occlusion from the atmosphere. So up there in space it has the monochrome look and down here it can appear more whitish or orange sometimes (like at dawn & twilight - I believe it's just the angle the light is coming in and your angle/perspective to the moon that gives it that orangey tint on occasions...or like how have to be in the right spot to see a rainbow).

Or another one to think about is how Mars is orange. Lots of iron oxide (rust) on the surface so when light is reflected back in our visible spectrum ala "color" photos you would see of Mars are just photos taken in our visible wavelength. For example taken in infrared it won't look orange because the photograph is only capturing light in the infrared spectrum and so when printed or put into a digital format (jpeg) it's being artificially colored - printed in an infrared reflecting ink would be invisible as we can't see in the infrared spectrum

. This is why some maps of the universe and such look completely different than what we see. They're being photographed in another light spectrum and being recolored into something in our visible spectrum.

I put a lot in there so it's some stuff to think about. I can't say every detail is correct so this is all AFAIK.

>-

Xyth · April 2013

ImpatientJedi wrote: »

...from exposure from the sun with out protection like an atmosphere to protect or erode the rock over time.

This is similar to what I was thinking.

Any sort of material that appears to be a color other than black/white/grey does so because it has some sort of wavelength-dependent absorption effect that happens to occur in the visible spectrum. The cause of this absorption anomaly is often fragile(for example: Chromophore), so when it gets into space and is constantly irradiated with all sorts of high-energy particles it's likely going to be broken down.

I can't think of any color producing mechanism that wouldn't be subject to photobleaching in an environment as hostile as the vacuum of space. I'll go pose the question to somebody who knows about such things and report back.

Kamamura · April 2013

The moon is grey because local aliens do not want to draw attention to themselves. From what they saw during the last two millennia of human history, they have plenty to fear.

ImpatientJedi · April 2013

Kamamura wrote: »

The moon is grey because local aliens do not want to draw attention to themselves. From what they saw during the last two millennia of human history, they have plenty to fear.

Lucky for the aliens the moon has no oil.

TychoCelchuuu · April 2013

This is some serious thread necromancy going on here.

ScardyBob · April 2013

That's because the space orcs painted the moon battleship gray.

SquishpokePOOPFACE · May 2013

So is that sorcery speed or instant?

ScardyBob · May 2013

Squishpoke said:

So is that sorcery speed or instant?

Instant ofc

glenn0510 · September 2017

I wonder where is the moonlight coming from.

Why is the moon greyish black?

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