Colour on the orion nebula?

[Riley86 (Adam)]

From my inner city sydney skies I always see it as a dark green im 25 years old so it must be my youthful eyes, I think the older you are the harder it is to see the colours

[Pinwheel (Doug)]

The colour negative spectrum is Blue to yellow, red to cyan & magenta to green. We know the human eye is prone to seeing Green stronger than red, so based on that knowledge, It's our eyes neutralizing the natural magenta colour of M42 because Green cancels Pink. The colour is there & this is why colour film works & why we can't see the pink other than a green cast.

You have all taken a photo with flouro light or mercury vapor light in the room. When you got your photo back it has GREEN cast yet when you took the photo the room looked white. This is the same effect.

Fact.

[dj gravelrash (Dino)]

I was looking at M42 last week here in suburbia on the G Coast. My first ever nebula view through an 8inch dob borrowed from my Astro club. Could only see a sort of white gray. Still thought it was magic though but thats newbie enthusiasm for you lol.

[naskies (Dave)]

Most of the red colour that you see in photos of the Orion Nebula is due to H-a light at 656 nm. The greenish tint comes from OIII light at 501 nm.

If you look at the response spectrum graphs of cone cells, you can see that our eyes are very insensitive to H-a light (maybe 10% of L cones only) whereas OIII light will stimulate all three types of cones (S, M, L) at much higher levels. This is also why our eyes are more sensitive to green light in general - look at the response levels to light in the 490-560 nm range.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color

(scroll down to the "Perception" subsection and look at the graph with red, green, and blue lines)

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

Whatever the 'facts' say, the pale pink in the centre of the Pale green wings of M42 was obvious from the dark sky at Astro Camp on Monday night through Eric's SDM