Saturday, 14 June 2014

M42 (The Orion Nebula) on fire!!! HLA processed by me.

This is my favourite object in the night sky so getting the chance to process it just how I like it was brilliant. Thanks to the Hubble Legacy Archive anyone can.
I just HAD to post this image.  It may not be to everyone's taste but its how I like it.
Read below for details of how I obtained and processed it.

The original data for this image was downloaded from the Hubble Legacy Archive website ( http://hla.stsci.edu/ ). I downloaded three fits files. Basically that's  a set of red, blue and green (RGB) images taken by the Hubble telescope. I combined these black and white images using a free program called FITS Liberator and they just burst into colour. I wanted the nebula to look as if it was so active it was on fire, so I pushed the saturation to enhance the red. The Tiff file I produced was a massive 324 million pixels!! and it seems like you can keep zooming in forever, seeing incredible detail. I have also processed some others deep sky objects with great results. So if its cloudy and raining outside have a go!!!!