We humans acquired the means, very late in our evolution, to perceive a world of colour – and every day we spend phenomenal amounts of energy making the world even more colourful than it would otherwise be, with face paints and aniline dyes, fabrics and photographs, paints, powders and moving images everywhere.

But the further we leave our terrestrial environments behind, the more we confront a relatively colourless universe. At best, the Martian sky is mauve. The rings of Saturn are dun brown. The Moon is black and white. Or is it? Today, with a decent telescope and a digital camera, any keen amateur astronomer can demonstrate that the Moon is full of colour – but can our unaided eyes, so spoiled by life on earth, ever appreciate its de-saturated motley?

Exposed to radiations from which they were normally shielded by the Earth’s atmosphere, the earliest astronauts – balloonists with the US Air Force’s Man High and Excelsior projects –saw colours they conspicuously failed to identify on a Pantone chart. There are, after all, new colours to be discovered in space – but to see them, we need new eyes…

What Colour is the Moon? is a journey in space and time. We will see how colours, colour words, and the demands of art and industry have altered and enriched our understanding of colour. On the way we’ll re-enact Edwin Land’s startling “retinex” experiments in colour vision, and enjoy some (literally) dazzling optical illusions.

And we’ll journey across the lunar surface, taking in a spectrum that stretches from the sky-blue cast of the Mare Tranquillitatis, through the mysterious mustards near the crater Aristarchus to the red-brick “lakes” west of Montes Haemus.

The talk will be in the Science Museum’s Lecture Theatre on the ground floor of the museum. It’s open to all. No booking is necessary and seats are available on a first come first serve basis.