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!!!!