Another California


I recently posted a picture of the California Nebula (NGC1499) that used special processing to overcome sharpness and noise issues in the oxygen and sulfur channels.  As promised, I have captured some much better frames of these channels.  And I did experiment with other ways of combining them make a color image, but didn’t find any that looked better than the original.

So here is the final version, with 4 hours of H-alpha and 3 each of OIII and SII (10 hours total).  It is sharper than the previous attempt, and has better detail throughout.  But perhaps the most important change is that I flipped it to form a rising slope (left to right) rather than falling.  I think that gives it a more positive emotion.  Some will argue that we shouldn’t “distort reality” in astro-photos.  Never mind that many types of telescopes produce exactly this kind of distortion to the visual observer.  Certainly images used for science or education should be properly oriented, perhaps including the “north is up” rule, but I feel no compulsion to do this in an “artistic” presentation.  Terrestrial photographers sometimes manipulate images this way, even where the distortion is obvious.  What do you think?

NGC1499


About Greg Marshall

I am a retired electronics engineer and after a few months of enjoying my leisure I began to miss doing product development. My astronomy hobby always needed new solutions to unique problems, so I decided that whenever I came up with a good solution I would try to make it available to others.

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