click the pic…
It looks like Heaven.
If you can still find it, you may want to get a hold of the book A View of the Universe by David Malin. He has been one of the most highly regarded astral photographers in the world for decades. Images that he can pull out of an 14" plate rival anything that comes out of Hubble today.
djm
The Hubble](http://heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/gallery.html%22%3EHubble) Heritage gallery has some amazing photos.
There’s a scene in Joe](http://imdb.com/title/tt0099892/%22%3EJoe) vs. the Volcano (yes, I’m quoting a Tom Hanks movie) that gets to me every time. He and Meg Ryan are in the middle of the ocean on a raft made from his luggage. He’s been giving all of the water to her and he begins to hallucinate the shapes of the Zodiac in the sky, and then sees the full moon rise on the horizon. He stumbles to his feet to embrace it. He falls to his knees and says:
Dear God, whose name I do not
know, thank you for my life.
I forgot how big…thank you…for my life
I feel this way when looking at this photos, cynical atheist that I am.
Nuh-uh. Where’re the mansions?
I like that.
Check out Galaxies by Timothy Ferris too. It’s a gorgeous coffee table type book with fabulous photos and beautiful, lyrical writing.
I’m always disappointed that it doesn’t look like that through my 80mm refractor… :roll:
Great nebula. Great constellation.
Check out Hercules for a nice globular cluster, and obviously Andromeda for the ultimate spiral galaxy.
Hmm… wonder if the wife would tolerate me saving up for a nice big newtonian reflector…
Cool snap shot. So what f-stop did you use? 
Seriously, though. As little as I know about astro-photography, whether
done by the Hubble or from a more earthly base, aren’t space photos all
white light with no real “color” (no atmosphere to bring out the color
spectrum)? I think they run the shots through filters on the computer or
whatever to bring out the colors strictly for our benefit. Without the man-
made color they would still be incredible images, just less dramatic.
Does a particular color come out on its own when run through the filters,
or is it altered in each photo to give it the color that someone wants it to
have? Dumb question maybe, but I’m just curious.
Will O’Ban
Sure!
…as long as you didn’t actually buy the thing!
I feel this way when looking at this photos, cynical atheist that I am.
Scientists at Florida State Univerity have just discovered and photographed the
nebula Utopia–wherein lies the Kingdom of God.
Not quite. The colour is there, but due to the extreme distances it has to travel, the normally small differences in speed between different wave lengths of the spectrum, coupled with limitations of the receiving medium (e.g. the back of your eyeball) all conspire to muddy the colours into white (or grey). If you look through a telescope at the Orion nebula, no matter how good or big your 'scope is, you will see a grey smudge. Sometimes the glass lenses will make it look more like a greenish-grey smudge.
All they do with the colour filters in astro-photography is take several long-timed shots per filter, often on b&w film (because the different speeds of the different colours require different amounts of time and when filtered, will only show the portion of the spectrum you want) and then composite the individual shots back together again. That’s when the “mucking about” factor comes into play. More processing can pull out incredibly fine details, even from b&w photos. And then they often go beyond what would be “natural” colour and enhance the colours to highlight more details. The photos aren’t taken for aesthetics, but to pull out details for scientific investigation, so, although they have the ability to calculate what would be the natural colours, astronomers go for any enhancement that furthers their studies.
djm
Thanks for the well-worded explanation, djm. I feel like I actually learned something. 
Will O’Ban
Su - f%^&*ng - perb.
Slan,
D.
Pretty little thing, isn’t it?
Bing Crosby
Gorgeous shots. Did you take that one of the crescent over the water,
Denny? That’s one amazing photo.
Will O’Ban
No Will. They are from the same web site as the others…
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive
The picture is a link to its own page.
I did take the pictures on our web site. They are not that good.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0508/katrina_goes12_big.jpg
one more amazing picture.