I have always wanted to capture a color image of the moon – I find those types of images very attractive and interesting to view because the moon is usually a white or grey color when you see it in the sky or view monochrome images.

Well, I finally did it – I can now capture the moon in color – here it is:

There are browns, blues, and of course grey, but this is indeed a color image!

I captured this using my Hestia telescope, coupled with my phone. The settings I used were ISO 100 at f1.7 with an exposure of 1/48 sec. This image is made up of a stack of seven images, captured on April 14, 2024, when the moon was about at about 75 degrees elevation.

I developed the stack and colors using Affinity Photo 2 instead of Photoshop because it offers more flexibility around weighted luminance and live layers.

Stacked from Video

I took a video of the moon and used PIPP to extract the color data, used AutoStakkert to create the base color layers, and finally used Affinity Photo to create the final, colorized version…

This version has more color and clarity. The color saturation is a little high, but that’s alright for a small image as is presented here.

Conclusion

In this article, I presented a color image of the moon, that I captured using my phone and a Vaonis Hestia, along with processing using Affinity Photo.