On October 1, Reddit user Darya Kawa Mirza, known by their username daryavaseum, uploaded the photo to the r/space subreddit, with the title: “One of the sharpest moon image[s] I ever captured through a 8-inch telescope.”

As of October 6, the photo has gained more than 62,000 likes and around 1,000 comments.

The Reddit user told Newsweek that they captured the image using “a Celestron NexStar 8SE with a Canon EOS 1200D attached to it.”

“I started shooting 360 raw images then I combined them into one to reveal the color and increase the sharpness as well as the clarity of the surface,” they said. “Keep in mind this is a cropped version from the original one. I mainly use photoshop to merge all my images.”

The photo illuminates a section of the moon in great detail, revealing countless crater marks and ridges illuminated by the sun.

It also shows that the moon is not entirely white and gray, although it may seem that way when seen from Earth with the naked eye. Much of the moon’s surface contains minerals that are naturally gray, which is what we see from Earth.

Astronauts from the Apollo missions have all noted seeing different colors on the moon during missions, from chocolate brown to pale blue, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

These tones are due to differences in the mineral composition of the lunar surface—specifically, variations in iron and titanium content. Dark blues tend to signal areas rich in titanium-bearing minerals, whereas orange and purple indicate regions that are relatively low in titanium and iron.

The crater marks seen in the image are the result of billions of years of asteroid bombardment. While both the moon and the Earth have experienced many asteroid strikes, Earth has natural processes such as erosion from weather, water, and plants that get rid of the craters over time.

Because it has no atmosphere, the moon does not go through these processes. As a result, craters tend to stay put.

Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, told LiveScience in April that around 100 ping pong ball-sized space rocks hit the moon every single day, each packing a force of around 7 lbs of dynamite.

Cooke also estimated that larger rocks such as ones that are 2.5 meters across hit the moon once every four years or so.

Update, 10/6/22, 9:10 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to credit the image source as per their preferences.