Park Ranger told me a new way to see nebula photos and it clicked

I was hiking near Mount Rainier last weekend and stopped to chat with a park ranger about the astronomy display they had. He pointed out that in most photos of the Orion Nebula, the pink areas aren't really pink in space, they're just hydrogen glowing at a specific wavelength. I always thought the colors were natural, like a sunset, so hearing that it's more like a false color map made me rethink how I look at every astronomy picture now. Has anyone else gotten their head around how they assign colors to those deep space shots?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_james8d ago

When you look up how they process those Hubble images, they literally assign specific colors to specific elements like sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen. The standard palette is usually sulfur mapped to red, hydrogen to green, and oxygen to blue, then they combine them to get those wild looking shots. If you want to see the raw black and white frames from a telescope, they're usually available on the Space Telescope website and it really changes how you see the final color versions.

nathan_patel8d ago

Oh yeah totally, I pulled those raw frames once and it blew my mind (in a good way).