First Attempt at Narrowband: “Pillars of Creation”
With the remote access to real qualiity teIescopes, I’ve been wanting to try “narrowband” imaging.
Regular color imaging involves red, green, and blue exposures generally along with a fourth exposure with a luminance (black and white) filter. Narrowband imaging uses filters that pass only specific wavelengths that are emitted by gasses consisting of specific chemicals. The most common combinations are Hydrogen Alpha (Ha), Sulphur 2 (Sii), and Oxygen 3 (Oiii). Capturing the emitted light from these three gasses allows analysis of the makeup of a particular cloud of interstellar gas.
The so-called “Pillars of Creation” became famous due to a stunning image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The filtration and processing of the image provided incredible detail and dimension. Even the 100cm instrument in at the El Sauce Observatory in Chile could not equal the Hubble image, but it provided me with some nice raw images that I could process.
The mixing of the colors was done specifically in the “Hubble Pallet”. It was made easier by having a copy of the Hubble image for comparison. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s pretty close.
Light, Shadow, Form, and Texture 