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Originally Posted by skysurfer
One word: Impossible. Period.
Human eyes are not sensitive to Halpha at low intensities. Otherwise one can see colors in Eta Carinae and even the North America nebula.
The 'red' you 'see' is just wat you want to see, but actually it is monochrome bluish green as only the rods in the eye are activated.
Using a larger scope does not increase surface brightness as a larger scope won't allow using low magnifications: one is stuck to 1/6x per mm of aperture.
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I don't think it's impossible, in fact numerous people have claimed to see red in the Orion nebula.
The first time I noticed it I wasn't even looking for colour and it had been a while since I last saw a photo of the Orion nebula. When I got back inside the first thing I did was look up photos of the nebula and the colours matched very well with what I saw.
Other than planetaries, I haven't seen colour in any other extended nebula though.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by 75BC
Then I looked at M42. At first I thought I was seeing things. I could see colour in it. All I had read up to then was that this was not possible. I kept looking away from the eyepiece and back again and there it was. Not a lot, but definitely there. The main body of the nebula was tinged green, but most impressively was the area where the wings protrude from, and their edges, were a definite reddish purple.
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That's close to what I can see. The brighter inner part has always been an obvious bluish-green colour even with a 60mm refractor.
Recently I tried a number of online colour acuity and contrast tests, I scored perfectly in all of them. However I'm not sure how accurate an online colour test is.
I found this test particularly difficult:
http://wvw.igame.com/eye-test/ but still got a perfect score of 29