M17 in colour

[Peter Ward]

Finally got some colour..in very average seeing. A waxing Moon will likely dash any hopes of better conditions for a time....

Also, despite my best efforts to tone down the h-alpha blend, I'm not sure why the data still looks rather monochromatic.

Other (high-quality) web images seem to vary wildly in colour...again from rather red, to something like a crosswalk in Taylor Square. (If you are not from Sydney: think rainbow)

Anyway here 'tis

[h0ughy (David)]

I see it is another horrible effort ;-)

[Atmos (Colin)]

It does look good Peter
As for the colour, how does a straight RGB compare to the HaRGB?

One thing I do try to do at times is attempt to get the HaRGB to have the same colour as a RGB as the RGB tends to show more of the blues and other colour variations.

[Retrograde (Pete)]

Looks great.
Regarding the colour I'm not sure what else could be done? There's not a lot of blue in the field other than a few stars anyway.

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

I think it's very good indeed.

The structures that are emitting the aqua light (presumably OIII) seem quite sharply demarcated, and have a lot of internal detail which is distinct from the structures with H-alpha emission.

Mike

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Hi Peter,

Looks good, dynamic range has been compressed though - the highlights in the core have lost the "etherial" feel and the dark dust detail at the base has been lost from your earlier mono version.

A quick revisit and you'll have another cracker imo

[multiweb (Marc)]

Not bad at all. Always hard to blend colour with Ha. You'll have another shot at it once that weather's passed.

[gregbradley]

Looks quite good. Ha blending is a difficult part of astrophotography.
Perhaps adding a bit of O111 will add another colour which would help.

Greg.