Art and science come together to celebrate the Night of the Moon: in the International Observe the Moon Night NASA has chosen the photo of the Italian Marcella Giulia Pace entitled 'Moona Lisa', in which the image of the Mona Lisa emerges from the mix of colored images of the Moon.
"It is a work of Optical Art that combines science, art, observation, perception, illusion and ingenuity: all terms that perfectly fit Leonardo da Vinci's attitude towards reality", observes the Sicilian amateur astronomer author of the photo, now a veteran of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (Apod).
"Leonardo da Vinci understood that the reasons that explain the color of the sky were the same that determine the different colors of the Moon at its rising or at its birth", observes Pace, and by observing closely the Moona Lisa "the design of the face and many moons appear with their natural colors, arranged as if they were the pixels of a normal photo ".
The final image, continues the author of the photo, "is the remixing of a work created by Gianni Sarcone in 1997, which reproduced Leonardo's masterpiece with 142 perfectly spaced colored beads, placed at the intersections of an imaginary two-dimensional triangular network. Here , instead of the balls, is the palette of colored moons taken from the image 'Colors of the Moon' ", the photo of Marcella Giulia Pace who had been the Nasa Apod of 11 November 2020.
To reproduce the darker parts the ashy light of the Moon has been included in the painting, that is the luminous manifestation on the dark surface of the Moon of the solar brilliance reflected by the terrestrial oceans, described more than 500 years ago by Leonardo da Vinci.
