1st Tarantula Nebula

[PeterEde (Peter)]

50 minutes
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5614/...01c41e0f_b.jpg
Tarantula Nebula NGC2070 by Peter Ede, on Flickr

[Rex]

Nice Peter, good detail. I thought it was a little blue at first but your yellow stars seam to be the right colour. Maybe because of the unmodded camera, I'm not sure. Great image never the less.

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

yep good job Peter, Rex is right in unmodded cameras the tarantula appears very blue.

cheers

[PeterEde (Peter)]

Thanks guys. I was a little disappointed in the lack of colour. I did try a colour balance. added some vibrance too but removed it. I like the area, there's a lot going on.
Can I get more colour with filters? Or do I need to mod my 40D. This was taken with my 60D

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Originally Posted by PeterEde

...
Can I get more colour with filters?

Yes you can. In fact you can have it any colour you want, depending on which filter you use. Unfiltered it's going to be pretty much all blue. With a gentle LP filter you will start seeing some shades of red. With stronger filters like the CLS and Astronomik UHC you will see more and more red tones as the contrast with Ha increases. If you were to use a modified camera and a filter you would see mostly all reds. It's a weird and wonderful nebula this one!

I'm trying to get a mixture of blues and reds in the shot I'm doing, but it's a tricky one to balance.

[andyc (Andy)]

Nice image. I had a look into this a while back, and it seems that there's a lot of emission that isn't just H-alpha from the Tarantula (and others in the LMC, and NGC346 in the SMC. I think there's a lot of OIII (I dug out an old research paper on it once, no idea where now), but it means that with an unmodded camera the blues and greens quickly dominate the image (as you only have about 20-30% H-alpha transmission). I'd guess that in an un-modded camera, the loss of H-alpha red along with more H-beta and OIII together, make it bluish?

[PeterEde (Peter)]

I guess I'm stuck with a blue/white Tarantula.
Still and impressive nebula. Clouds tonight just to annoy me