Italian elementary school teacher Marcella Pace has always had a passion for astronomy. This led her to pursue astrophotography. And over the years, her works have been chosen by NASA as the Astronomy Photo of the Day and shortlisted for the Astronomical Photographer of the Year Awards. In particular, the image of the moon with 48 different colors has attracted a lot of attention. This work took 10 years to make and is a sight to behold.
Outside the Earth’s atmosphere, the dark Moon is illuminated by reflected sunlight, appearing a beautiful brownish-gray color. However, when viewed from within the Earth’s atmosphere, the moon can appear in a variety of colors. The moon’s red or yellow color usually comes from when the moon is seen near the horizon. There, some of the scattered blue light traveled a long way through Earth’s atmosphere, sometimes filled with fine dust. Moons with a blue hue are rarer and could indicate that this is a moon seen through an atmosphere carrying larger dust particles. What causes the moon’s purple color is still unclear – it could be a combination of several optical effects.
“During the outbreak, I spent quite a bit of time at home so I had a lot of time to look back at my old pictures,” Pace told My Modern Met. “Looking back at my photos, I decided to single out all the moon images I’ve taken since I started using my digital camera. I picked 48 of the moon’s best colors and stitched them together. Together, those were taken when the moon was rising or setting or when atmospheric scattering caused interesting colors.”
Therefore, the final work is the “quintessence” of her more than 10 years of photography.
After being selected as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day in November 2020, it continued to go viral on the internet. “There’s something fascinating about the photo, and I get compliments on it every day from all over the world,” Pace said.
The moon reflects light from the sun – it doesn’t really produce any light of its own. The perceived brightness of the moon depends on its position in its orbit around the Earth. The color of the moon can vary from red and purple to white or yellow. However, that is due to optical phenomena in our atmosphere, not caused by the moon itself. In other words, it’s just the apparent color, the actual color doesn’t really depend on the optical hazard.
Marcella Pace also made a similar image of the sun. “The entire Sun, including all its inner layers, is luminous. ‘Sun’s colors’ are the spectrum of colors present in sunlight, which arise from a complex interplay of each other. from all the components of the Sun,” said Christopher Baird, an associate professor of physics at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas.
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