20 years ago Hubble's "Pillars of Creation" image gave me an obsession with space. Now after 2 years of learning this hobby I can properly capture them myself. Here's my latest shot taken from my backyard. [OC]
Some context here: This was taken around 6 months ago, but earlier this week I went back and reprocessed my data from that imaging session to try and do these pillars justice. This is a Summer nebula, and is visible to the naked eye in the core of the milky way from dark skies. The pillars are visible with a low power telescope.
This is false color. Almost every emission nebula is just red in true color since they're mainly burning hydrogen. This is called Hubble palette, instead of using RGB filters I isolated the emission lines for burning hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur (which burn as red, blue, and red respectively) and mapped them to Green, Blue, and Red to build a color image with higher contrast and detail than true color would allow, while cutting right through my light pollution. This is the telescope I used. I'll also challenge people that understand photography and optics to find what I artificially added to this image as an aesthetic choice (it's not the colors).
For more astrophotography, come check me out on instagram. All my shots are taken from my backyard in Sacramento, and I share behind the scenes and tips on how to get into this hobby.
“Images taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope uncovered a cloud of hot dust in the vicinity of the Pillars of Creation that Nicolas Flagey accounted to be a shock wave produced by a supernova. The appearance of the cloud suggests the supernova shockwave would have destroyed the Pillars of Creation 6,000 years ago. Given the distance of roughly 7,000 light years to the Pillars of Creation, this would mean that they have actually already been destroyed, but because light travels at a finite speed, this destruction should be visible from Earth in about 1,000 years.”
Wow, so we may be looking at something here that was destroyed 6,000 years ago...but we still get to enjoy it from afar for another 1,000 years.
![image showing 20 years ago Hubble's "Pillars of Creation" image gave me an obsession with space. Now after 2 years of learning this hobby I can properly capture them myself. Here's my latest shot taken from my backyard. [OC]](508e7fd7-b05a-5c68-9535-cfb9e2bc8e12.jpg)
ajamesmccarthy on December 8th, 2019 at 13:16 UTC »
Some context here: This was taken around 6 months ago, but earlier this week I went back and reprocessed my data from that imaging session to try and do these pillars justice. This is a Summer nebula, and is visible to the naked eye in the core of the milky way from dark skies. The pillars are visible with a low power telescope.
This is false color. Almost every emission nebula is just red in true color since they're mainly burning hydrogen. This is called Hubble palette, instead of using RGB filters I isolated the emission lines for burning hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur (which burn as red, blue, and red respectively) and mapped them to Green, Blue, and Red to build a color image with higher contrast and detail than true color would allow, while cutting right through my light pollution. This is the telescope I used. I'll also challenge people that understand photography and optics to find what I artificially added to this image as an aesthetic choice (it's not the colors).
For more astrophotography, come check me out on instagram. All my shots are taken from my backyard in Sacramento, and I share behind the scenes and tips on how to get into this hobby.
awildyetti on December 8th, 2019 at 13:58 UTC »
This is stunning when compared between yourself and the f’ing HUBBLE. Congrats!
Serial_Doubter on December 8th, 2019 at 16:21 UTC »
From Wikipedia:
Wow, so we may be looking at something here that was destroyed 6,000 years ago...but we still get to enjoy it from afar for another 1,000 years.
Space is trippy.