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Machanskid86 OP t1_j79pn3f wrote

Imaged by me from Brisbane, Australia. 12.5 hrs of overall imaging time over three nights with about 4 hours each on the Sii, Ha and Oiii filters to produce this narrowband image. Used the Hubble Palette for the colour with Sii to Red, Ha to Green and Oiii to Blue. NGC 6188 is a star forming nebula, and is sculpted by the massive, young stars that have recently formed there – some are only a few million years old

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Massive-Peanut7111 t1_j79smxy wrote

Sorry for my ignorance 😅 I feel like you explained it here, but are these colors real?

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Machanskid86 OP t1_j79v4mb wrote

Hi, this is a false colour image taken using narrowband filters.

The nebula is called an emission nebula. An emission nebula is a nebula formed of ionized gases that emit light of various wavelengths. The most common source of ionization is high-energy ultraviolet photons emitted from a nearby hot star. The common wavelengths that astronomers like to capture are those from ionised Sulphur (Sii), Hydrogen (Ha) and Oxygen (Oiii). I use a monochromatic camera and then use filters to capture the light. For this image I used filters that are called narrowband filters because they only capture a very narrow part of the light spectrum. The ones I used capture Sii, Ha and Oiii. I then assign each of these filters to a colour to produce the final image. The Hubble Palette was developed by NASA and it basically maps Sii data to red, Ha to green and Oiii to blue.

This video has a really good explanation on narrowband astrophotography. https://youtu.be/0Fp2SlhlprU

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Massive-Peanut7111 t1_j7a1eqa wrote

wow thank you! I appreciate learning new things :) I’ll definitely check out the vid too. Beautiful image

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gstormcrow80 t1_j7bqc4u wrote

It’s it explained in the video OP links below, but those bandwidths are pronounced “S-2” “H-alpha” and “O-3”.

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OHMG69420 t1_j7ehi44 wrote

Whenever I see such photos, I imagine some alien craft might be hauling ass through it and we will never know…

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Machanskid86 OP t1_j7eny4j wrote

Yup same. Each little dot is a star like our sun and while I was looking at them, there might be someone on a planet out there looking back at me.

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