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Author Topic: A recent one from the Hubble...  (Read 2955 times)

dwood

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A recent one from the Hubble...
« on: December 15, 2009, 10:23:26 pm »

Exploring these images is a blast, and this one is particularly powerful.

link
 

Peter McLennan

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A recent one from the Hubble...
« Reply #1 on: December 15, 2009, 10:52:24 pm »

Quote from: dwood
Exploring these images is a blast, and this one is particularly powerful.

link

Amazing stuff.  Who could possibly imagine that's all out there, somewhere?

I wonder what the image data would look like for these images?  Several hours at f22 and 10000 ISO?
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bill t.

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A recent one from the Hubble...
« Reply #2 on: December 16, 2009, 11:47:07 am »

That image is 600,000,000,000,000 miles or right around 1,000,000,000,000,000 km across.  There's just no way to comprehend stuff like that, which hints at the limits of our mental horizons.

Those stars are flying around at stunning speeds, and those clouds are expanding just as fast.  Yet over a human lifetime that image will essentially not change at all.  So just try to enjoy the bright lights and the pretty (false) colors.  We humans are less than a finger snap in the cosmic pageant.

I have seen this object through a telescope, you have to be pretty far south.  To human eyes it's all diamonds and white mist.  The photons that zapped by neurons that night had been traveling for 170,000 years at 186,000 miles a second to meet me.  Of course that's how I perceived the interval, as far as the speed-of-light photons were concerned the journey took no time at all.  But enough of this, my monkey-brain is starting to hurt.
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Justan

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A recent one from the Hubble...
« Reply #3 on: December 16, 2009, 12:12:28 pm »

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought-- particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.

-Woody Allen

wolfnowl

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A recent one from the Hubble...
« Reply #4 on: December 16, 2009, 01:28:09 pm »

Quote from: bill t.
That image is 600,000,000,000,000 miles or right around 1,000,000,000,000,000 km across.  There's just no way to comprehend stuff like that, which hints at the limits of our mental horizons.

Those stars are flying around at stunning speeds, and those clouds are expanding just as fast.  Yet over a human lifetime that image will essentially not change at all.  So just try to enjoy the bright lights and the pretty (false) colors.  We humans are less than a finger snap in the cosmic pageant.

I have seen this object through a telescope, you have to be pretty far south.  To human eyes it's all diamonds and white mist.  The photons that zapped by neurons that night had been traveling for 170,000 years at 186,000 miles a second to meet me.  Of course that's how I perceived the interval, as far as the speed-of-light photons were concerned the journey took no time at all.  But enough of this, my monkey-brain is starting to hurt.

Yes, it's amazing stuff to ponder!

Mike.
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Deepsouth

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A recent one from the Hubble...
« Reply #5 on: December 16, 2009, 02:45:48 pm »

Yes, it is impressive. But as insiders we know the real story. It's a beautiful "reimagining" of reality, since the colors are not what one would see but are "assigned" colors for each of the gaseous components. If it helps NASA to sell programs like this, I am all for it, but they should more forthcoming about what the public is really seeing here.
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ckimmerle

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A recent one from the Hubble...
« Reply #6 on: December 16, 2009, 05:13:04 pm »

Quote from: Deepsouth
Yes, it is impressive. But as insiders we know the real story. It's a beautiful "reimagining" of reality, since the colors are not what one would see but are "assigned" colors for each of the gaseous components. If it helps NASA to sell programs like this, I am all for it, but they should more forthcoming about what the public is really seeing here.

Why would that be relevant? B/W photogs don't offer color conversion charts for their prints and those shooting color certainly don't stick with the standard palette that mother nature provides.
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feppe

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A recent one from the Hubble...
« Reply #7 on: December 16, 2009, 06:33:59 pm »

Quote from: Deepsouth
Yes, it is impressive. But as insiders we know the real story. It's a beautiful "reimagining" of reality, since the colors are not what one would see but are "assigned" colors for each of the gaseous components. If it helps NASA to sell programs like this, I am all for it, but they should more forthcoming about what the public is really seeing here.

Uhh, what? The link posted very clearly states that

Quote
The blue color is light from the hottest, most massive stars; the green from the glow of oxygen; and the red from fluorescing hydrogen.

so no insider info required.

I thought this was a well-known feature of astrophotography. Not only does it result in visually pleasing images, it also serves real science by helping visualize different gases and their concentrations. Human vision is not equipped to deal with the vast variance in wavelengths, so it's much more useful to compress the colorspace to something we can readily see - think compressing your ProPhoto RGB images to sRGB for web use.

And what ckimmerle said. It's not like moderate saturation and color accuracy are in vogue in these days of HDR and overuse of Vibrancy slider.
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