Congratulations to Vicent Peris, Jack Harvey, Steven Mazlin, José Luis Lamadrid and the rest of the DSA team for their wonderful image of the ring nebula. It has been officially released today at Calar Alto's website:
http://www.caha.es/the-ring-nebula.htmlDon't forget to scroll down the page and click on the links to download the full-size JPEG and TIFF versions.
I personally know how this image has been made, step-by-step from its very beginnings to what you can see on the release above. In my opinion, this image is a neat example of excellency in astrophotography: excellent observation planning, excellent acquisition, and excellent image processing.
This image is also exemplary in that it represents a way of understanding astrophotography based on evolving technological and aesthetic culture, along with a strictly respectful attitude toward the nature of the data. You can be sure that what you see here is only a representation of data from the objects photographed. In particular, in this image you'll find:
- No hand painting.
- No hand masking.
- No manipulations of shape or color on arbitrary selections, neither hand-made, nor without coherent, uniform criteria applied on the basis of fundamental properties of the data. Selective processing has been applied as a function of signal-to-noise ratio, spatial scale, and spectral properties of the data.
- No cosmetic repairs that can compromise integrity of visible image structures, or that require guessing unavailable data to the point of arbitrary creation of nonexistent image structures.
In short, this is just astrophotography, and I want to say thanks for that.
