I've been meaning to check out this early release Euclid data. It's pretty amazing. I've been watching the image releases and feel like they have a few issues with color balance and clipped histograms. After some investigating I still think that's true. Here's a roughly processed image. You can compare them yourself and see if you agree. https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/05/Euclid_s_new_image_of_star-forming_region_Messier_78
There are a lot of different ways to check your processing for color balance, but I think one of the more fun ones is to take a look at the diffraction spikes. With well separated wideband data, it always comes out colored like a rainbow. If your diffraction spikes aren't prismatic, things might be off (or you might have a really red star.)
anyone know some good software for working with FITS cubes? Ideally I'd like to be able to either save all of the slices individually or flatten them all into a 2D image
@spacegeck I normally use QFitsView, it's quite versatile for dealing with cubes. You can save individual slices, make maps within custom wavelength ranges, and many other things.
Off the top of my head I don't remember if you can automatically save all slices in one go with some custom numbering scheme. I normally do this with imcopy in Iraf because it's easy and I'm old :D
Brought the stars back after isolating them to their own layer so they wouldn't add up and be super bright since they're all in the same spots over the years unlike the nebula. Also added a 2005 observation. Unsure if I want to add more or just stop here.
My computer is down while I wait for a replacement power supply. I drew a phoenix on a tiny piece of scrap board to test out some pencils I bought last month to pass some time.
tonight's question: do x-ray astronomers care at all about what bands color imagery generated from their data use? does it matter?
fun fact: x-ray images come from event files and each photon gets its energy level recorded, so you can divide the bands however finely or coarsely you want! this does not make it easier to decide what color to make things...
Happy to finally be able to share some of the work I've done with Cas A. Here's what I call the "technicolor dreamcoat" version that includes infrared light from JWST, x-rays from Chandra, and visible light stars from Hubble.
my brain hurts too much from covid to go down this rabbit hole of "are my non-stick pans really coated in a harmful substance" tonight. man I wish I knew someone with expertise in this subject.
like there's a huge overlap between some claims I know are wrong like "GMOs are harmful! eat only organic" and the people who say the non-stick pan chemicals are harmful. but that doesn't mean the latter is wrong
man, I got this JWST investigator demographics survey thing and it was like, "what level of your career are you at" and I put "mom" and then "what kind of employer do you have" and "a toddler" 😂 gotta throw curve balls at stsci
@spacegeck That's funny. I can't shut up about how significant your work has been in helping to popularize space and astronomy to the general public. You've made a huge difference, especially at the beginning when nobody knew how to properly present those first JWST images.
A quick experiment with some old HST data for V838 Mon, which is a beautiful light echo. Here, instead of using multiple filters to create color for a single epoch, I've used multiple epochs with same wideband orange (F606W) filter layered over itself, showing what parts of the spherical volume of gas and dust were revealed over multiple years all at once. Redder parts are older parts of the echo while yellow and bluer parts are younger.
Today I'm using Montage (http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu/) to make my own JWST mosaics since the pipeline ones are unsuitable. I'm actually having success! It ran straight away without issues on my Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in the PowerShell console.
Working on this drawing of a very good boy. Not sure if I’ll regret using the cloth to smooth the background… usually don’t like the smudged appearance, but it might be ok this time
new erasers made it much easier to floof his fluffies and stringify his stringies. I think this is basically done, but I’ll give my eyes a rest and look again later. also can’t find a can of fixative in this overgrown village to save my life.