by zloq » Mon Feb 07, 2011 6:47 pm
Chris Peterson wrote:Narrow band filters have notches that are 5-10nm wide. With nebular emission sources, the very narrow emission line dominates, because it is usually much stronger than reflected or scattered continuum light. But for stellar sources, the continuum energy around the emission/absorption line dominates, by several orders of magnitude (that's why you can't see any Ha structure at all looking at the Sun with one of these filters). And what does the continuum source look like? For all but the coolest stars, the three filtered wavelengths lie on the long side of the blackbody peak, along a section with a steep negative slope. The OIII filter will pass a much higher intensity than the Ha filter or SII filter. So for all stars, when mapped to the Hubble palette, you'll get strong blue, with an approximately equal (but much smaller) mix of green and red. This is most of the way towards the star color seen in most Hubble palette images. You get the rest of the way when you normalize the three color channels to optimize the contrast.
I don't know why you two are so insistent that a false color rendition of narrow band images captures something fundamental about star color - either as blackbodies or as objects with absorption bands. You seem to think the magenta of stars is largely inherent in the imaging process - and is only helped by "normalizing" the three color channels. In fact, based on the filters used, the "intensity" in the images is very different from what you predict.
J. Hester's article on the image can be found in AJ 111 #6, 1996. p. 2349. Equal exposures were made with three filters, and the filters have different bandpass. The Ha filter is 2.2nm bandpass, the Oiii is 2.7, and the Sii is 4.7. For a solar blackbody spectrum at 5800K, if you use a wavelength dependent (not frequency) form of the blackbody curve you can then multiply by the bandpass to get an estimate of power delivered through each filter. Sii (red) has greatest power, while Oiii (blue) is next at 68%, and Ha is least at 47%. This is very different from your prediction, which ignored bandpass of the filters. In fact, the change in blackbody power from 500nm to 660 is only about 14% (power per wavelength, not frequency) and would be a small factor compared to bandpass and camera sensitivity.
Hester does not provide details on the color composite image, but the gray scale images he shows have sqrt() applied to increase the dynamic range. My guess is that each exposure had sqrt() applied, and then the three channels were combined with scaling to make it look colorful. Although the power from stars would be weakest in Ha (green channel), as I said, the power from the nebulosity would be dominated by Ha, so that it would be combined with less weighting compared to Sii and Oiii - resulting in magenta for objects like stars that are relatively "white." When you combine this scaling with the original square roots - and the different filter bandpasses - the result is very far from a pure RGB image that captures inherent weighting of the objects - whether stars or nebulae.
As I said - the star color is what you get when you combine the channels, which are dominated by Ha colored green, with weighting that makes the nebulosity look most colorful to fill the gamut.
zloq
[quote="Chris Peterson"]Narrow band filters have notches that are 5-10nm wide. With nebular emission sources, the very narrow emission line dominates, because it is usually much stronger than reflected or scattered continuum light. But for stellar sources, the continuum energy around the emission/absorption line dominates, by several orders of magnitude (that's why you can't see any Ha structure at all looking at the Sun with one of these filters). And what does the continuum source look like? For all but the coolest stars, the three filtered wavelengths lie on the long side of the blackbody peak, along a section with a steep negative slope. The OIII filter will pass a much higher intensity than the Ha filter or SII filter. So for all stars, when mapped to the Hubble palette, you'll get strong blue, with an approximately equal (but much smaller) mix of green and red. This is most of the way towards the star color seen in most Hubble palette images. You get the rest of the way when you normalize the three color channels to optimize the contrast.[/quote]
I don't know why you two are so insistent that a false color rendition of narrow band images captures something fundamental about star color - either as blackbodies or as objects with absorption bands. You seem to think the magenta of stars is largely inherent in the imaging process - and is only helped by "normalizing" the three color channels. In fact, based on the filters used, the "intensity" in the images is very different from what you predict.
J. Hester's article on the image can be found in AJ 111 #6, 1996. p. 2349. Equal exposures were made with three filters, and the filters have different bandpass. The Ha filter is 2.2nm bandpass, the Oiii is 2.7, and the Sii is 4.7. For a solar blackbody spectrum at 5800K, if you use a wavelength dependent (not frequency) form of the blackbody curve you can then multiply by the bandpass to get an estimate of power delivered through each filter. Sii (red) has greatest power, while Oiii (blue) is next at 68%, and Ha is least at 47%. This is very different from your prediction, which ignored bandpass of the filters. In fact, the change in blackbody power from 500nm to 660 is only about 14% (power per wavelength, not frequency) and would be a small factor compared to bandpass and camera sensitivity.
Hester does not provide details on the color composite image, but the gray scale images he shows have sqrt() applied to increase the dynamic range. My guess is that each exposure had sqrt() applied, and then the three channels were combined with scaling to make it look colorful. Although the power from stars would be weakest in Ha (green channel), as I said, the power from the nebulosity would be dominated by Ha, so that it would be combined with less weighting compared to Sii and Oiii - resulting in magenta for objects like stars that are relatively "white." When you combine this scaling with the original square roots - and the different filter bandpasses - the result is very far from a pure RGB image that captures inherent weighting of the objects - whether stars or nebulae.
As I said - the star color is what you get when you combine the channels, which are dominated by Ha colored green, with weighting that makes the nebulosity look most colorful to fill the gamut.
zloq