If you had access to a massive super-telescope, you could create to-die-for vistas of other galaxies, right? Maybe… but actually, it’s harder than you’d think. The European Southern Observatory offered amateur astronomers the chance to turn its wealth of data into images, and here are some results.
The winner of ESO’s “Hidden Treasures” contest, Igor Chekalin, gets a free trip to Chile to visit the ESO’s Very Large Telescope. And runners up get prizes like an iPod touch, a “laser cube” model of the VLT, and some other goodies. To win these prizes, the amateurs had to dig through the ESO’s mountains of data and figure out how to represent it as images.
According to the ESO press release:
The pictures of the Universe that can be seen in ESO’s releases are impressive. However, many hours of skilful work are required to assemble the raw greyscale data captured by the telescopes into these colourful images, correcting them for distortions and unwanted signatures of the instrument, and enhancing them so as to bring out the details contained in the astronomical data. ESO has a team of professional image processors, but for the ESO’s Hidden Treasures 2010 competition, the experts decided to give astronomy and photography enthusiasts the opportunity to show the world what they could do with the mammoth amount of data contained in ESO’s archives.
Here are some of our favorites, among the 20 winners. You can see more via the link. [ESO]
NGC1850 EMMI by Sergey Stepanenko.
A color image is composed of:
R – Ha filter, 1x 1548second exp.time
G – SII filter, 1x 1800 second exp.time
B – NII filter, 1x 1800 second exp.time
M78 nebular complex in Orion, by Igor Chekalin.
Image was calibrated, and Stacked from RAW data via IRAF software, composed/ white-balanced in Iris, and post-processed in PhotoShop.
NGC3169 & NGC3166 and SN 2003cg (ESO 2.2m telescope, WFI camera) by Igor Chekalin.
NGC6729 by Sergey Stepanenko.
Combined from:
H-alpha filter (6×950 seconds) – RED channel
SII filter (6×950 seconds) – BLUE channel
Ha+SII (50/50)- GREEN channel
NGC 3621 by Joseph DePasquale.
Around 22 million light years away, in the constellation of Hydra.
This image is comprised of data taken on the ESO WFI instrument.
4x300s B
4x300s V
4x300s R
4x300s Halpha
Dust of Orion Nebula (ESO 2.2m telescope) by Igor Chekalin.
R = HAlpha – Continum
G = Continum
B = Continum – Halpha * 0.05
Celestial Prominences NGC3582 by Joseph DePasquale.
The NGC 3582 nebula sits inside of the star forming region called RCW 57. The massive loops of ionized gas expelled by dying stars remind me of solar prominences. This image is comprised of data taken on the 2.2m scope at La Silla with the WFI instrument on June 16, 2002. Having only 2 channels of data to work with inspired some non-traditional color work.
7 x 5 min with H-alpha filter
4 x 30 s with Broadband Rc filter
Image was de-biased and flat fielded using IRAF with the esowfi tool. Channels were combined using PixInsight as:
red = halpha
green = 0.25*halpha + 0.75*Rc
blue = Rc
Combined channels were further processed in Photoshop to remove instrumental artifacts and tweak colors and crop.
Antennae Galaxies by Alberto Milani.
Antennae Galaxies
Antennae Galaxies – NGC 4038/NGC 4039
Based on observations made with the European Southern Observatory telescopes obtained from the ESO/ST-ECF Science Archive Facility.
Instrument: FORS1
Filters: R_BESS, V_BESS, B_BESS, H_Alpha, HeII
Aquisition dates: 2005-06-09 and 2005-08-07/08
Calibrated for bias and flat field with IRAF, processed with GIMP to combine colors and to enhance levels, contrast, saturation and other stuff.
Sakurai’s Object by Joshua (Josh) Barrington.
This image enhances Sakurai’s object. Data obtained using FORS2 instrument by ESO. The star field is taken through R, V and B filters.
The bubble is taken using the H filter.
Processing was done with FITS Liberator and GIMP.
NGC 1929, N44 Superbubble by Manuel (Manu) Mejias.
This is a composite image created with several shots from FORS1 instrument
I used H alpha, HeI and OIII filters (RGB)
This beautiful emission nebula is located in the large magellanic clud
NGC 3521 by Oleg Maliy.
NGC 2217 by Oleg Maliy.
