Carl Kwadrat
Carina Nebula (Hubble Palette)
The Carina Nebula NGC 3372 is observable to viewers in the southern hemisphere. It is about 8,500 light years from Earth and has a diameter of about 230 light years. The nebula is a very active stellar factory that is forming new stars primarily from hydrogen and other trace elements composed of interstellar gas.
The photo above shows the Carina Nebula produced using the Hubble Palette which was develop by the imaging team of the Hubble Space Telescope. Instead of using wideband red, green, and blue filters to capture all of the colors of the visible spectrum, the Hubble Palette uses three different narrowband band scientific filters: singly ionized sulfur (SII), singly ionized hydrogen (HII), and doubly ionized oxygen (OIII). Unlike the wideband true color filters that capture large swaths of color data, the scientific filters capture only 3 very small slices of the visible spectrum. The Hubble Palette maps the SII data into the red channel, the HII data into the green channel, and the OIII data into the blue channel in the astroimaging software used to process the tricolor filter data into a single false colored image like the one shown above. This color mapping is known as the chromatic ordering of the narrowband data across the visible spectrum.
The false colored images created using the Hubble Palette produce high color contrast in the image of NGC 3372 making the regions of the nebula composed of sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen stand out starkly. The narrowband image almost has a 3D appearance to it in comparison to a wideband true color image which has a softer, gradual contrast that lessens the appearance of the transitions between different regions of the nebula in terms of contrast. In this sense, the Hubble Palette false color image of the nebula is another visualization tool to present our eyes with a somewhat different perspective and an added comprehension of the structure and composition of NGC 3372 in greater detail beyond that of a true color image alone.
Where the Hubble Palette of false colors depicts multiple gas compositions, the mixing of the colors produces varied brown, gold, green and blue hues depending on the exact concentration of the 3 mixed gases in different regions of the nebula. In a sense, the Hubble Palette false colors opens the door to placing an abstract artistic dimension into the visual representation of a scientific object. False color palettes are used on a regular basis in astrophotography to expand the visual perspective of nebulae by expanding the color options to be used on an astrophotographer’s cosmic canvas while expanding the repertoire of “pretty cosmic pictures”. Note that uses of narrowband data alone causes stars to take on false colors that are different than those of wideband true color images.
The Telescope Live CHI-6 astrograph used to the gather the data is located at the el Sauce Observatory in Chile and is optically composed of an Officina Stellara RH200 200 mm (8 inch) diameter reflecting telescope with a photographic speed of f/3. The imaging system attached to CHI-6 is a Finger Lakes Instrumentation FLI ML PL16200 Monochrome CCD astronomical imaging camera. AstroDon narrowband scientific color filters (SII, HII, and OIII) were inserted between the telescope and the camera to acquire the complete set of imaging data used to make the final false color data of my Flickr photo. The astrograph is mounted on an l Astro-Physics 1200GOTO German Equatorial Mount.
Thirteen 10-minute exposures were taken through the SII, HII, and OIII narrowband filters for a total of 2.1 hours of data collection. The 275 MB of imaging data was download to my home PC for processing. Three software programs were used to convert the data into the above image. These are Astro Pixel Processor, PixInsight, and Adobe Photoshop 2021.
Carina Nebula (Hubble Palette)
The Carina Nebula NGC 3372 is observable to viewers in the southern hemisphere. It is about 8,500 light years from Earth and has a diameter of about 230 light years. The nebula is a very active stellar factory that is forming new stars primarily from hydrogen and other trace elements composed of interstellar gas.
The photo above shows the Carina Nebula produced using the Hubble Palette which was develop by the imaging team of the Hubble Space Telescope. Instead of using wideband red, green, and blue filters to capture all of the colors of the visible spectrum, the Hubble Palette uses three different narrowband band scientific filters: singly ionized sulfur (SII), singly ionized hydrogen (HII), and doubly ionized oxygen (OIII). Unlike the wideband true color filters that capture large swaths of color data, the scientific filters capture only 3 very small slices of the visible spectrum. The Hubble Palette maps the SII data into the red channel, the HII data into the green channel, and the OIII data into the blue channel in the astroimaging software used to process the tricolor filter data into a single false colored image like the one shown above. This color mapping is known as the chromatic ordering of the narrowband data across the visible spectrum.
The false colored images created using the Hubble Palette produce high color contrast in the image of NGC 3372 making the regions of the nebula composed of sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen stand out starkly. The narrowband image almost has a 3D appearance to it in comparison to a wideband true color image which has a softer, gradual contrast that lessens the appearance of the transitions between different regions of the nebula in terms of contrast. In this sense, the Hubble Palette false color image of the nebula is another visualization tool to present our eyes with a somewhat different perspective and an added comprehension of the structure and composition of NGC 3372 in greater detail beyond that of a true color image alone.
Where the Hubble Palette of false colors depicts multiple gas compositions, the mixing of the colors produces varied brown, gold, green and blue hues depending on the exact concentration of the 3 mixed gases in different regions of the nebula. In a sense, the Hubble Palette false colors opens the door to placing an abstract artistic dimension into the visual representation of a scientific object. False color palettes are used on a regular basis in astrophotography to expand the visual perspective of nebulae by expanding the color options to be used on an astrophotographer’s cosmic canvas while expanding the repertoire of “pretty cosmic pictures”. Note that uses of narrowband data alone causes stars to take on false colors that are different than those of wideband true color images.
The Telescope Live CHI-6 astrograph used to the gather the data is located at the el Sauce Observatory in Chile and is optically composed of an Officina Stellara RH200 200 mm (8 inch) diameter reflecting telescope with a photographic speed of f/3. The imaging system attached to CHI-6 is a Finger Lakes Instrumentation FLI ML PL16200 Monochrome CCD astronomical imaging camera. AstroDon narrowband scientific color filters (SII, HII, and OIII) were inserted between the telescope and the camera to acquire the complete set of imaging data used to make the final false color data of my Flickr photo. The astrograph is mounted on an l Astro-Physics 1200GOTO German Equatorial Mount.
Thirteen 10-minute exposures were taken through the SII, HII, and OIII narrowband filters for a total of 2.1 hours of data collection. The 275 MB of imaging data was download to my home PC for processing. Three software programs were used to convert the data into the above image. These are Astro Pixel Processor, PixInsight, and Adobe Photoshop 2021.