I don’t think it’s false coloured, it sounds like he used a consumer interchangeable lens camera, like a dslr or a mirrorless camera attached to a telescope.

I’m more a photographer than an astronomer but as far as I understand it those false coloured images are produced by monochrome sensors that are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies which have filters placed in front of the sensor to seperate out a specific frequency and then to create a single image they will photograph with different filters to get various “colours” then that data is mapped to the colour your monitor can display.

Whether the colour is true to life is a really complicated question for basically any photo you see lol. like, there is no simple objective answer for any photo imho unless it’s obviously a no

It's not false colors (that btw have a scientific goal), but the saturation is processed to be increased. Those are the "real" colors provided by a normal camera added to a very clear and highly resolution picture

From Earth, yes. It's called the diffraction limit [1]. With an ideal 1m diameter lens or mirror you cannot resolve features smaller than about 250m on the Moon. To capture a sharp 100 Mpx image, you would need a telescope of at least that size. When the aperture grows above 1m, atmospheric disturbances get progressively worse too, which is why all the really sharp imagery comes from satellites around the Moon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system

Apollo missions zoomed all the way the surface, so no physical limits in that regard

Not presumably. The highest resolution image is a stitched together image. Depending on the magnification of a given telescope, you'd have to stitch multiple shots to see the entire surface from multiple shots depending on the particular telescope used. My personal telescope was purchased specifically to see deep sky objects without needing to do stitching; a wide angle telescope if you will. In my scope on a full frame DSLR, the full moon is less than 25% of the frame.

This particular photographer stitched more than just enough shots to cover the full disc, but also from multiple phases which allows parts that would be in shadow during one night of imaging to be in full light during other nights of imaging. A "simple" mosaic of the full moon can be captured in a single night, but this guy said "hold my beer" and went nuts. Dedication doesn't even begin to describe

If we were to talk about hypotheticals, let's look at this picture of Io[1] taken from Earth's surface. Io's angular size is 1.2 arcsec. Feature of that apparent size would be ~2.2km in diameter on the surface of our Moon. With that kind of resolution it seems that you could map out features of 50-100m in diameter. Obviously though, no one will tie up one of the most expensive telescopes with a project of covering half of Moon's surface with that kind of pictures. A satellite would be a better tool for this job.

[1] https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/05/30/with-new-sharper-optics...

I found this article[0] that shows the gear he used for the images discussed within, but that was from 2022. He used a Celestron NexStar 8SE with a Canon EOS 1200D. If you really want to know, you can look up the magnification of that particular scope with the sensor size of that camera, and you can see how much of the moon would be imaged in a single snap. That would at least get you a closer guess. However, how much he overlaps is still a question. For this particular final image, it sounds like he's completely overlapped each image multiple times since there's 81,000 images used.

[0] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/stunning-detailed-image-of-m...

if you have 2000 small craters in an area from 100000 years ago, and then one big crater obliterates all that 1000 years ago - do you have relatively few craters?

Why are most of the craters relatively the same depth? Wouldn't we expect at least some to have done massive damage?

Perhaps because the same part of the moon always faces the earth which 'shields' the moon somewhat?

Just a guess

I had the same reaction. It's strange, as I assume I have seen photos in larger detail before, but perhaps they have all been black and white.