more on visual culture in science

[kaberett]

This morning I am watching the lecture I linked to on Tuesday!

At 6:53:

Here is an example of how the Hubble telescope image of the Omega nebula, or Messier 17, was created, by adding colours -- which seem to have been chosen quite arbitrarily -- and adjusting composition.

The slide is figure 13 (on page 10) from an Introduction to Image Processing (PDF) on the ESA Hubble website; I'm baffled at the idea that the colours were chosen "arbitrarily" given that the same PDF contains (starting on page 8) §1.4 Assigning colours to different filter exposures. It's not a super clear explanation -- I think the WonderDome explainer is distinctly more readable -- but the explanation does exist and is there.

Obviously I immediately had to stop and look all of this up.

(Rest of the talk was interesting! But that point in particular about modern illustration as I say made me go HOLD ON A SEC--)

Comments

[hilarita]

For radio astronomy, there aren't the same starting points as in optical/infrared astronomy, so a common way of imaging is to represent the brightness in the image as a path through the RGB colour cube from black to white. A common colour scheme for this is the helix-cube colour scheme, devised by Dave Green, which has the virtue that the path through the cube will show the correct intensity even if one is red-green colour-blind (and it *should* work for other colour vision anomalies too).

[kaberett]

Oh that is VERY cool, thank you!