Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:The Lion nebula.jpg

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File:The Lion nebula.jpg, featured[edit]

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes.Voting period ends on 20 Jan 2024 at 01:18:28 (UTC)
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SHORT DESCRIPTION
  • Gallery: Commons:Featured_pictures/Astronomy#Nebulae
  •  Info As before when nominating this author’s work I would like to note that this image has not been created by NASA or a similar space agency, it is the work of an amateur photographer with an account on Commons using a commercially available camera, telescope and software. The author leaves his very interesting commentary on each image he creates on the file page. I don’t think this disclaimer is necessary - I would still support this image if it were created by the Hubble Telescope - but I wouldn’t be so interested in nominating it then. I think it’s wonderful that work like this is possible by a skilled amateur and that it’s being made available to us under a Commons compatible license. created by Ram samudrala - uploaded by Ram samudrala - nominated by Cmao20 -- Cmao20 (talk) 01:18, 11 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Support -- Cmao20 (talk) 01:18, 11 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Comment Seems very oversaturated when compared with others on Google search. Charlesjsharp (talk) 10:54, 11 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Comment I think it is worth pointing out that I’m not sure categories like ‘oversaturated’ are really that meaningful in astrophotography. This image, like every image from the Hubble Space Telescope or the JWST, is false colour, it has started out black and white and the colour has then been added back by the author, who has observed the nebula over a long period of time (>60 hours) across all three colour channels using different filters and then used the dataset to reintroduce colour slowly by hand. This is not like an out of camera RAW or JPEG where the colour has been pumped up too high.
As for whether the colours are ‘correct’, this is subjective. They are certainly not ‘natural’ in the sense that this is not what the nebula would look like if you saw it by eye through a telescope, and in that sense the pics you have Googled are probably more ‘accurate.’ But neither is any image from Hubble or the JWST. When I first saw Jupiter through my own telescope I was surprised how muted the colours are compared to the glossy bright red of NASA photos. Some astrophotographers prefer to process their pictures to look as close to what they personally see out of a telescope as possible. Ram Samudrala prefers instead to use the ‘Hubble palette’, in which he tries to imitate the colour palette used by Hubble as closely as possible - in part because it is more aesthetically pleasing, in part because a wider colour palette allows more gradations of shades between bright and pastel, which allows him to bring out finer features of the nebula. He alludes to some of these choices in the notes on the image page. You are very welcome to vote against if you dislike the end product - FPC is subjective and if you hate it, you hate it. But I would like to point out to other potential voters that there is nothing ‘wrong’ about this authorial choice, it is merely that the author has chosen to produce a Hubble-style’ image more than a ‘natural colour’ image. Cmao20 (talk) 13:40, 11 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you Cmao20 for that awesome explanation, you definitely captured the spirit of what I was trying to do. I'd add that astrophotography is part observation but also part creativity/artistry. One of the things I do with my images, since everyone images the same objects again and again, is try to make things pop a bit, make it more psychedelic and take risks. Like with all art, it may not work for everyone. But my goal is to make my image different from what others have done.
I created this image just for Wikimedia Commons from older data since last summer was a bit slow (only managed to get three images done). Here's a more muted image
on my AstroBin https://www.astrobin.com/g20c4j/D/ (and other variants) without the additional processing. But maybe Charlesjsharp prefers this more. I'm not replacing the main image, I think it's the best choice personally but my goal is to demonstrate that there are many ways to depict this object. This was a particularly tough one as you can see by the various versions I have.
Also, the three filters I use are hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur, which as you say produce B&W images which are then mapped to green, blue, and red. The Hubble Palette combines the green and red to create an orange (since naturally hydrogen and sulphur are both red) and the oxygen is in blue, which is both aesthetically pleasing and highly informative. Ram samudrala (talk) 08:22, 22 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Confirmed results:
Result: 15 support, 1 oppose, 0 neutral → featured. /-- Ivar (talk) 08:57, 20 January 2024 (UTC))[reply]
This image will be added to the FP gallery: Astronomy#Nebulae
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