What artificial color means (Oberon, moon) ?

Question

What artificial color in this Wikipedia article actually mean?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(moon)

Answer 1

Ooooooh.



You are talking about this picture? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Oberon_USGS.jpg



Oberon is actually brown and slightly red in real life, like this... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Voyager_2_picture_of_Oberon.jpg



They just changed the color of the other picture to blue so that we could see the craters more easily.

Answer 2

Artificial color is often used in images to make things easier to see that might otherwise be missed. For example, in fMRI scans which measure brain activity, artificial colors are overlaid to highlight areas of high blood flow. Without the artificial color, the differences in brain activity would be almost invisible to the human eye.



Artificial color is often used in space science photos to highlight things like interesting terrain features, differences in atmospheric composition, etc.. You'll often see pictures of Saturn and its rings with artificial color used to highlight different gases and currents in Saturn's atmosphere.



In that picture from Wiki it looks like the artificial color is used to more clearly show the terrain features (craters and such) which might otherwise not have enough contrast to be seen.

Answer 3

The more common term is "false color".



It means that the image was originally greyscale (no color) and was colorized either to enhance contrast or as an educated guess as to what the colors of the surface may actually be.

Answer 4

Artificial colour means the image was enhanced with additional colours in order to bring out detail and increase contrast.

This is often done with astronomical images to make it easier to see and study smaller details.

Answer 5

it may propose the Moon is made by making use of a few thing different than organic motives. and in all possibility could teach the existence of extraterrestrial beings. although, the Moon is organic, and has been around as long through fact the Earth.

Answer 6

All the above answers do qualify as correct.