Travis Rector's image looks "flat" to me, where all the colors are strongly separated and remain one and the same hue. It sort of resembles the old Dick Tracy movie. Look at the pink Ha features in the Travis Rector image. They are exactly the same shade of pink everywhere. Adam Block's image, however, shows that the Ha regions are more or less mixed with blue starlight. Some Ha regions are all pink in his image, others are purple, and others show a mixture of pink, white, purple and blue. This is exactly what we should expect. In some Ha regions the stars are completely embedded, and the nebula will look all pink. In others the stars are partly or fully revealed and contribute blue light to the nebula.Chris Peterson wrote:I'm saying that it's entirely possible that the Rector image shows more accurate color than the Block image. There's no way that I can make that assessment conclusively just looking at the images, however.Ann wrote:I don't understand you, Chris. Are you saying that the Travis Rector APOD shows "accurate color" while Adam Block's RGB image is "unnatural"?
An unexplained feature of Travis Rector's image is the beige swath of galactic disk stretching from 3 o'clock to 9 o'clock in the image. Like Geck said, this might contain an interesting piece of information about the presence or absence of dust in the disk. But we can only guess at what causes this beige color, since nothing is explained.
Ann