Stars and Nebulae
Titled “California Dreamin NGC 1499,’” this image captures the Californian Nebula, a 100-light-year-long cloud of dust and gas that resides about 1,000 light-years from Earth. The image was captured over seven nights in 2021. It is not a true-color image—some of the gases are mapped to specific colors (hydrogen to green, a kind of sulphur to red, and doubly ionized oxygen to blue).
“While nebulae are often known for resembling colourful clouds in space, this photographer has managed to beautifully use a rainbow of colour to tease out the different gases in the California Nebula,” said competition judge Emily Drabek-Maunder, an astrophysicist, astronomer, and science communicator at Royal Observatory Greenwich, in an observatory release. “The composition of the photograph almost looks like a splash of paint against the starry background!” All the stars in the nebula were removed from the image and digitally replaced in post-processing with the stars from the red, green, and blue wavelength data. The resultant image is a starburst of color in space.
