Oh, who would have ever expected something like this to happen, in this comic?! But seriously, don't worry, the scene is not about to break off into some weird sex tangent; I'm committed to maintaining good plot pacing! Actually, I really do feel like this chapter was well paced overall.
Not sure how clear it is, but in the third and fourth panel, I was trying to show that her baton weapon thingee can telescope shut when she needs to put it away. It didn't come out quite as well as I'd have liked, but oh well. Whaddya gonna do.
When China's Chang'e 4 lunar lander and Yutu 2 rover sent back their first pictures from the far side of the moon, they had a decidedly reddish tone to them. This stands in stark contrast to the familiar lifeless gray lunar surface we all remember from the Apollo moon landings. So what gives? Was the moon really brownish red all along? Were the Apollo missions all a giant hoax?
Well, in the case of the Change'e 4 images, the answer is straightforward enough: Their lander's camera records images in separate color channels – red, green, and blue – and apparently for some reason it was more sensitive to reds than to other color channels. So it was producing red images that needed to be color corrected in order to provide accurate color. I've seen versions of the Chang'e 4 photos where the histogram has been properly calibrated, and they look much less dramatically red.
But this is still a somewhat misleading depiction of the moon's surface. We tend to think of the moon as a shining silver globe in the sky, but it is actually a very dark object. The moon's surface has nearly the same albedo as asphalt. It looks a lot brighter than it actually is, because we see it contrasted against the dark night sky and our eyes suck at accurately gauging brightness under those conditions. I'll do an expansion blurb on the moon's brightness some other time, but to keep this blurb short, I'll leave it at that.
There are actually plenty of good photos from the Apollo mission which give a good representation of what the moon's surface really looks like. You have to find photos where the white-suited astronauts are contrasted against the ground. It looks like dark volcanic ash. There's a lot of variation in brightness though, which I think probably had more to do with the camera's calibration/exposure than anything else. The moon is not an easy place to take photos, or so I've heard. The Apollo astronauts even thought to bring a color calibrator with them, so you have a good idea what the colors are supposed to be.
These photos came from The Apollo Archive, which has thousands of rare photos from the Apollo missions. Well worth having a look at! It really helped me gain an appreciation for just how friggin' epic the moon missions were!
IN LIVING COLOR
So I never did answer the titular question: What color is the moon? Well, it's lots of different colors, though mostly muted earth tones. The Apollo astronauts even discovered orange clay underneath the surface, along with beads of a green glasslike material. So, the color of the moon's surface, much like that of the Earth, depends on where you are.
The Galileo spacecraft took some excellent full color images of the moon in 1992 on its way to Jupiter. This mosaic of the moon's North Polar region is probably my favorite. It reminds me a lot of Jupiter's giant moons Ganymede and Callisto.
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