There are many ways how to assign visible and invisible colors
captured by CCD camera to red, green and blue colors visible to
humans. On such combination is called HST palette, because
images captured by Hubble Space Telescope (HST) made such images
popular.
Once we get used to the fact, that the image is colored to be
aesthetically pleasant despite completely differently than is its real
appearance, we can further play with colors. The image above in fact
does not follow the HST palette, but uses its variant called
gold. Just to illustrate how the original HST palette looks,
Martin provided also image strictly adhering to this standard.
Martin used his G3-16200 camera on 30 cm, f/3.8 Newtonian
astrograph telescope. Total exposure time achieved 31 hours. We
encourage everyone to click on respective images to explore them in
details. True quality of astronomical photographs is hidden is details
and is revealed when we examine them in high resolution. Perfectly
focused, round stars and rich details in nebulosity make these images
state-of-the-arts.
To save our readers’ time, we also provide the real-color-like
bicolor image of the NGC 2237 Rosette nebula here despite we
already presented it in separate article on our web site.
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