Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Beautiful DSS2 picture of NGC 7000, the North America Nebula

Beautiful DSS2 picture of NGC 7000, the North America Nebula
Click on the image to enlarge

This beautiful picture is a composite from black and white images taken with the Palomar Observatory's 48-inch (1.2 meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope as a part of the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS II). The images were recorded on two glass photographic plates - one sensitive to red light and the other to blue and later they were digitized. In order to produce the colour image seen here a total of 62 different frames were processed with the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator by Italian amateur astronomer Davide De Martin - 31 frames for each colour band, coming from 4 different plates taken from 1990 to 1993. The original file is 14,264 x 15,429 pixels with a resolution of about 1 arc-second per pixel. The image covers an area of sky larger than 4° x 4.3° (for comparison, the Full Moon is about 0.5° in diameter).
Credit: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator & Digitized Sky Survey 2

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