by NGC3314 » Sun Nov 30, 2014 3:27 pm
The first (widely-reproduced, at any rate) color pictures of deep-sky objects came from the work of photo expert William Miller with several of the scientists at Mt. Wilson at Palomar in the late 1950s, rating an article in Life magazine. In the 1960s, some of the astronomers up the coast at Lick Observatory got notable results with color emulsions and careful treatment of bright nebulae. In the 1970s, David Malin at the Anglo-Australian Observatory made the technique of combining multiple images on photographic plates through different filters into color products, mastering a very finicky process.
The next breakthrough was widespread digital treatment of images, initially scanned photographic plates and later digital imagers (first modified TV cameras, then solid-state chips), while software and hardware allowed display of color composite images from multiple files.. By 1980 there were a handful of astronomical sites where this could be done - JPL, Kitt Peak, Groningen... but the best way to save the results was still to take a picture of the computer monitor (or scan that output straight onto film). GIF, JPEG, etc. had yet to be invented in the days before networks became widely usable. Then workstations with color monitors proliferated. and with first widespread Internet and eventually WWW, color-composite images could escape into the wider world.
The first (widely-reproduced, at any rate) color pictures of deep-sky objects came from the work of photo expert William Miller with several of the scientists at Mt. Wilson at Palomar in the late 1950s, rating an article in Life magazine. In the 1960s, some of the astronomers up the coast at Lick Observatory got notable results with color emulsions and careful treatment of bright nebulae. In the 1970s, David Malin at the Anglo-Australian Observatory made the technique of combining multiple images on photographic plates through different filters into color products, mastering a very finicky process.
The next breakthrough was widespread digital treatment of images, initially scanned photographic plates and later digital imagers (first modified TV cameras, then solid-state chips), while software and hardware allowed display of color composite images from multiple files.. By 1980 there were a handful of astronomical sites where this could be done - JPL, Kitt Peak, Groningen... but the best way to save the results was still to take a picture of the computer monitor (or scan that output straight onto film). GIF, JPEG, etc. had yet to be invented in the days before networks became widely usable. Then workstations with color monitors proliferated. and with first widespread Internet and eventually WWW, color-composite images could escape into the wider world.