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Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/False color Moon

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Original
Reason
KNHaw nominated this image on Picture Peer review and I'm seconding it. I just copied and pasted the excellent caption KNHaw put on the image page. It is fantastically beautiful, and is packs a huge amount of information about the composition of the moon's surface. KNHaw anti-aliased it after nominating at at WP:PPR. It's still got visible color-balance signs of the stitching job by NASA (see the upper tip of the moon for an obvious example), but I figure it shows the process of creating the image, NASA did it so it would be hard for anyone here to fix it, and if anyone is going to fix it it would be once they saw it here, not at picture peer review.
Proposed caption
This false-color mosaic was constructed from a series of 53 images taken through three spectral filters by Galileo's imaging system as the spacecraft flew over the northern regions of the Moon on December 7, 1992. The part of the Moon visible from Earth is on the left side in this view. The color mosaic shows compositional variations in parts of the Moon's northern hemisphere. Bright pinkish areas are highlands materials, such as those surrounding the oval lava-filled Crisium impact basin toward the bottom of the picture. Blue to orange shades indicate volcanic lava flows. To the left of Crisium, the dark blue Mare Tranquillitatis is richer in titanium than the green and orange maria above it. Thin mineral-rich soils associated with relatively recent impacts are represented by light blue colors; the youngest craters have prominent blue rays extending from them. The monochrome band on the right edge shows the unretouched surface of the moon. The Galileo project, whose primary mission is the exploration of the Jupiter system in 1995-97, is managed for NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Articles this image appears in
Geology of the Moon
Creator
NASA

Promoted Image:Moon_Crescent_-_False_Color_Mosaic.jpg MER-C 08:47, 25 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]