Red moon desert

Red moon desert, originally known as Full Moon over Red Dunes, is a wallpaper included in Windows XP, licensed from Corbis. It was taken by Charles O'Rear in the late 90s, who also took XP's iconic default wallpaper, Bliss. It depicts part of Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, South Africa at night, with the moon visible in the left corner. At the same time O'Rear shot several photos of the same desert. While those are rights-managed, this photo is royalty free. It also appears on a card in cards.dll.

People have observed that the moon appears to be upside down compared to what is seen in the Northern Hemisphere, giving rise to the possibility that it is a digital composite. However, O'Rear has never confirmed this. It is also worth noting that the moon is not upside down on images related to it, and the image as a whole is more saturated in appearance compared to the alternate shots.

History
After Westlight was acquired by Corbis in 1998, the company sent O'Rear around the world for a year to take photos of wine regions. During his time in South Africa, he also took several photos of the desert in Kalahari Gemsbok National Park at night. As they were part of an assignment for the company, Corbis owned the rights to them until 2016, when its image licensing business was sold to Unity Glory, an affliate of Getty Images partner Visual China Group. They currently own the rights, and consequently none of these shots appear on his PhotoShelter, where he has made several of his own photos available for licensing. However, as all of the shots except the one used in XP were taken down, it is unclear who currently owns the rights to the other shots, although possibly still Unity Glory.

In 2000, Microsoft licensed it for use in Windows XP, then codenamed Whistler. It was one of the first new wallpapers to be included with the operating system, along with Azul, Bliss, Follow (then titled Follow me), Moon flower, and Vortec space. According to Raymond Chen, it was originally intended to be XP's default wallpaper, but was allegedly changed due to some testers feeling it resembled a pair of buttocks, leading to O'Rear's other photo Bliss becoming the default wallpaper. However, it is possible that Microsoft were already trialling various default wallpapers (including the branding wallpaper), and that the tester complaints did not actually impact the final decision.

Alternate shots
Red moon desert is one of many desert shots taken by O'Rear in Kalahari Gemsbok National Park in the late 90s. It was part of a series of 12 images on Corbis of the same area; some of these are noticeably similar to the one included in XP, such as a vertical shot and a shot of the same spot with no moon present. However, they do not appear to be digital composites, as the moon is not upside down in any of them and the desert/sky is not as saturated. While this series was transferred to Getty Images, all of the rights-managed shots became restricted assets in January 2020 before being taken down in December 2020. Red moon desert, however, remains commercially available due to it being royalty free to begin with.

There were also alternate shots that were not submitted to Corbis at the time. Among these is one that takes place during daytime. This appears to be a digital composite, as the desert appears very similar to Red moon desert's, and the clouds have appeared in other digital composite photos O'Rear produced. There is also one that takes place during sunset, but this would have been taken in an earlier photoshoot as it originates from Westlight, meaning it was taken before 1998.

Names in other languages
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