why is the moon gray? Options

[tfisher]

Really this applies to a lot of the solar system worlds, just the moon is the nearest and most visible. Why is it gray? I'm thinking there are two contributing possibilities :

(1) it looks gray because human vision is limited to distinguishing only a narrow range of the spectrum; if we could see a wider range of colors it wouldn't be so gray.

(2) it really is gray, even well beyond the range of human vision. This is because it is made up of gray rock, which doesn't have interesting spectral features really at any part of the spectrum.

My inner seven-year-old is begging to know "why". A bit of googling seems to indicate that (2) is more of a correct answer than (1) -- at least the only colorful images I can find seem to be forced false-color by some processing to give extreme exaggeration to tiny color differences. Is that right? Can anyone elaborate?

[helvick]

If I remember correctly the moon has quite a brownish tinge with a lot of variety but most of the images we see are monochrome. Here's a link to some Galileo color images of the moon that demonstrate this. It is still pretty gray but I think Phil's comment explains that.