Space Madness

Proposal to gay up the Moon

No really. I'm serious. NASA has said they're going to return to the moon in 2018 (using basically the same technology they used last time, which makes me very sad)

So I propose they take a 50lb bag of fluorescent pink powder like they use for marking lines on football fields and make a 1km per side equilateral triangle on the moon.

Why? Well. Triangles are easy to detect from more organic forms. At that size, you'd be able to see it with a telescope and since the Earth reflects a lot of UV, on new moons, you might even be able to see it without a telescope.

The moon is often yellow/blue/greenish to our eyes so fluorescent green/yellow are right out. Red light penetrates our atmosphere better than any other color and we already know there is orange volcanic rock on the moon but hot pink is less likely. Also, based on seeing old traffic and trail markers, I think fluorescent pink dyes last longer than orange ones.

And last of course.... A giant pink triangle would SERIOUSLY piss off the right-wingers because it'd not only be proof we'd been to the moon but it would be GHEY!


Anyone want to start a petition? :)

More Moon Madness

So.... I went home to see if I could REALLY gay up the moon or not.

I took the highest resolution photo of the moon I could find and scaled it based on the diameter of the moon so that 1 pixel = 1 kilometer. (The image was awesomely close to this nice ratio so it worked well)

Since the moon is a sphere, I thought putting my triangle as close to center would be a good idea and in a dark sea. Less craters/mountains, higher contrast.


The green arrow points to roughly where my triangle is. It's much too small to see at this resolution though. (~12km/px) In fact you can only barely make out the arrow.

BUT if you look just about the length of the arrow's head above the arrow in this full resolution image, you can see a lone pink dot.... (warning, roughly 3600x3600 pixels) Of course... That would be the entire area was solid pink and a square.

So let's be a little more realistic. I zoomed WAAAAAAAY in and made generous pink lines 1/3 of a meter (about a foot) wide. A doable size but still pretty darned large.

At 1000 times the magnification of big photo above (warning: 2000x2000 image), our triangle is actually pretty visible! Cool! I think you could actually see that at an observatory!

And even at only 100x, if you look very very close, you can very faintly see it.

But at 50 times the resolution of that big picture, it's gone.">

Or is it? If we turn the saturation way up. It suddenly leaps out!

In fact: Even at a mere 10 times the magnification of that photo, cranking the saturation all the way up still reveals our mark!

So... If you had a strong telescope and knew exactly what to look for and where to look, you COULD see a 1km chalk triangle on the moon. Cool. :)