(Virtual) Gallery Talk with Astrophotographer Dr. Eric Coles

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The Hubble Palette – Mapped Colors of Emission Nebula: A Live Demonstration

Space and earth-based telescopes look at a wide variety of the electromagnetic spectrum all the way from radio waves, through the visible spectrum to high energy gamma rays. They use filters or sensors of one sort or another to select for certain of these wavelengths. However when they want to represent this information in an image they are limited to the visible spectrum. Therefore the collected wavelengths, say in the infrared, need to be “mapped” to a color we can see.  This mapping, sulfur ll=red, hydrogen-alpha=green and oxygen lll=blue, is commonly called the Hubble Palette.