Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Haese
Doug nice work, maybe just bring the blues up a little and perhaps just take a look at those dark halos around the stars.
As for not using Ha for pure luminence; well I am in disagreement. I have used it several times and it took some time to get the blend right but it can and is often used by many astrophotographers. Rob Gendler is one I can think of as using it often for luminence and in tri colour emission lines. He even has a technique for sorting the balance. Technically I am sure Richard is correct but this is often as much about art as it is about science.
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I am not impressed with Gendler's work; It always looks overprocessed to my eye and I don't buy using Ha for luminance. It helps accentuate some detail but at the expense of fouling the color balance and severely attenuating data that already trends to being too faint at the outset (oxygen and sulfur to be specific). People work like hell to get the sulfur and oxygen data that is already orders of magnitude fainter than the hydrogen and then they turn around and attenuate the faint by adding Ha as luminance atop it. It ought to be plain that this is a mistake if you take the time to think about this analytically.
I simply don't care for the overprocessed look that is becoming all too common: sort of like a bad flu that is making the rounds, keeps getting passed from one to another :-)
We can agree to disagree on this and you can do what you like of course.
I do agree that this can be as much about art as it is science but if art is the goal then that ought to be stated at the outset and the result should NOT be called an image, it ought be called a painting or something else that clearly differentiates it from being an accurate reproduction of something real.
In my working definition of an image, that excludes things like painted in detail, sharpening due to the artifacts left behind and so on. I realize this is controversial and is goring a sacred cow or two, but this is my opinion and it is as equally valid as anyone else's opinion and when you have everyone saying the same thing no one progresses with any new ideas.
If you take the time to research it, you will find that when I pioneered the tricolor emission line method in widespread use today way back in 2001, I got mostly negative comments by those that didn't like it because it didn't look like Gendler's RGB.
but time has shown it to be a preferred method for nebular imaging, particularly from light polluted imaging sites that are far too common these days and were I have listened to the majority opinion at the time none of this would have ever happened
the moral of the story is that true breakthroughs start with a small group of people that dare to do things differently. It was true when Columbus sailed west to go east, it happened when Copernicus challenged The Church with his heliocentric view and happened when Einstein theorized that Newton's mechanics were only a special case
I am not for one moment representing that this work of mine approaches the work of these giants but I am saying that groupthink is often wrong and history has shown that to be true many many times. I further assert that this is yet another example of groupthink being on the wrong track.