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NGC 2029 SHO, Niall MacNeill
NGC 2029 SHO, Niall MacNeill

NGC 2029 SHO

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 2029 SHO, Niall MacNeill
NGC 2029 SHO, Niall MacNeill

NGC 2029 SHO

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Description

Psychedelic NGC 2029
I have been experimenting with a new technique for presenting Narrowband data that I have seen used by  @Kurt Zeppetello to great effect. Traditionally the Hubble Palette is used where SII is mapped to red, Ha to green and OIII to blue. This often leads to unsatisfactory results and if the Ha is dominant, to green images, which basically look plain ugly. Narrowband Hubble Palette images are therefore often morphed towards blues and golds to overcome the aesthetic displeasure. Since this is all false colour, it doesn't matter how the colours are attributed, but it is best that one chemical species is mapped to one colour.
Recently a new technique called Colorized SHO has been developed and Steve Miller has worked it up, even though his was not the original idea. Kurt made reference to his YouTube presentation on the technique:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn7UGWlPxfI
Here the imager simply converts the OIII monochrome image for example to the RGB Colour Space and colourises the image blue. Ha is made gold and SII red-gold. When combined with PixelMath, assigning the colour image to each colour channel, the software extracts the appropriate component from the image and builds the final colour image accordingly.
In the comments section there is some disquiet as to how the approach taken actually works. One of the commentators on the YouTube video summarized it well as follows: "The explanation is pretty simple. I have just recreated this effect in photoshop. From the o3 image, only the blue channel is copied to the final image. from the s2 only the red channel, from the ha only the green channel. That's how the algorithm works with transfering rgb data to a grayscale. when matching an rgb-image to a color channel, let's say to blue, only the blue data from the rgb-image is used as a greyscale. red and green will be thrown away. In the end the magic is just getting the right stretch for each channel which is sort of automated with this workflow. very well done. @enteringintospace4685 thank you very much for this great idea."- Ferdigrafie
The array of colours that results from this is amazing. You can see nice blobs of hydrogen, and where there is only hydrogen, it does take on a green hue as expected. However, the combinations of red, green and blue, where the various Sulphur, Hydrogen & Oxygen species exist and overlap, give rise to a most splendid array of colours. So visually this does show the relativity of the abundance through colour which to an extent our eyes & brain can interpret. I preseume for example that where we see pinks, there is a preponderance of SII (red) and OIII (blue), but little Ha (green) and so on and so forth.
I added back RGB stars, although these were pulled back from before. I restored some of the star clusters and background galaxies in Photoshop from the original LRGB image to, what I think, is good effect. Steve Miller adds back grayscale Luminance stars, but I think the RGB stars and coloured features such as galaxies in the background look much better in natural colour.
Revision B shows the original LRGB image as a mouse-over which shows how well the SHO image brings out the sructure and chemical composiiton of the nebulae.

NGC 2029 (also known as ESO 56-EN156 or the Dragon's Head Nebula), which is an emission nebula in the Dorado constellation and is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). It is part of a complex of nebulae and stars, including NGC 2032, NGC 2035 and NGC 2040 and can be seen at middle right in the image. It was discovered by James Dunlop on the 27 September 1826.
The LMC, our galactic neighbour is replete with these vast areas of nebulosity. The complexity of this area  is breathtaking with the beautiful combination of emission and reflection nebulae dramatically set against the myriad of stars that populate our galactic neighbour. At lower left NGC 2004 is an open cluster of stars which was again discovered by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop. This is a young, massive cluster with an age of only about 20 million years and 23,000 times the mass of the Sun., it is about 20 l.y. across. At upper left the blue ring shaped nebula is NGC 2020, is described as a HII Region surrounding the Wolf-Rayet star BAT99-59, although its colour belies that and next to it is a large Ha emission nebula NGC 2014.

I hope you like the psychedelic result.

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Revisions

  • Final
    NGC 2029 SHO, Niall MacNeill
    Original
    NGC 2029 SHO, Niall MacNeill
    B

B

Description: LRGB

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NGC 2029 SHO, Niall MacNeill