Quality of "Colour" in your Scopes.

[profees]

OK being new to the hobby this might sound like a stupid question but when you are looking through your scopes whatever they are, with the naked eyes what "amount" or quality of "colour" do you get.

Or just shades of greys/blues ?

If you are able to EDIT an image to make a comparable image of what your eye actually sees not the camera can you post it please.

[661-pete]

Can't help with the edited image you ask for, but expect colours to be much less prominent visually than what you see on the images posted on this forum (many of which are 'false-coloured' e.g. the Ha band is artificially coloured red etc...) but don't let this put you off! Many faint objects are sensed only by the greyscale components in your eyes, you need more light to see colours. Cameras are different.

Even looking at Mars (when it returns to view) in high power, you'll likely see it as more pinkish than red. Saturn will appear pale buff. Expect a lot of Deep Sky objects to appear just grey.

However I have noticed a definite bluish tinge when visually observing M57 say.

Maybe others with younger eyes can do better than I can!

[profees]

Dont get me wrong its cool just being nosey looking around up there even if it is mostly "darker" colours cause that kinda ties in with what im seeing, not really taken long exporsure images before Do "they" (the people who take them) just stack the images an get a final colour image from this or do they actually add the colour for what they assume it should be.

[SteveL]

DSO images never have added colour. They just have the RGB colour that is already there boosted, or enhanced by using narrowband images in Hydrogen Alpha or such like to add to the RGB colour data. Remember, these images combine the light from several HOURS to create an image. Your eyeball is never going to compete with that!

(You`ll get the DSO imagers after your blood for saying they add colour!)

[Doc]

Visually what I see in my scope is Green around M42. Blue around M45 and a touch around the Cone Nebula. Green/Blue in the Ring Neb m57. NGC7662 is a very blue nebula.

Lots of stars are orange and blue.

[661-pete]

(You`ll get the DSO imagers after your blood for saying they add colour!)

OK, let's - er - re-phrase to avoid that sanguinary outcome . DSO'ers who shoot narrowband emphasise the coloured contribution appearance of the narrowband components for presentation. Nothing wrong with that. The colours are in the right places but far more saturated than in 'real life'. Certainly there's no way that you'd ever see the beautiful colours in the best - say - M42 - representations, however hard you strain on it visually.

For those like myself who take one-shot colour with an (unmodded) DSLR, there's not much we can do beyond playing with the curves (usually in all of RGB simultaneously) and winding up the saturation a bit. I try to avoid false-colouring if I can though I have sometimes pushed an image to the red for printing, to compensate for my printer's tendency to blue things up...

But I digress from the original topic. Certainly brighter stars show their colours far better through a telescope and are worth looking at for that reason. Binaries with contrasting colours are even better visually: try Albireo as an excellent example.

I wonder (not having tried it) how easy it is, visually, to see the contrasting colours of the two 7th-mag. 'attendant' stars of M13 - which show up so well on many RGB images.

[philf]

My understanding is that you will never see colurs very well through a scope because the eye consists of cones (to see colour) and rods (to see black and white) - the rods are attuned to work in low light conditions and the cones arent

So, you see colour in daylight but not so much at night to help you see at night (i.e. night vision).

So, you cant gather enough light through a scope to see colour so well so you will never see what you get in pictures which is photns added to photons added to photons (i.e. a long exposure time) to capture the colour that is there.

I guess what I'm satying is its not sa scope thing but an eyesight thing that cant ever be fixed because as soon as you get in the dark the cones in your eyes switch off.

Or isnt that what you were asking ? Sorry if it wasnt and its a case of grnadmothers and eggs

Phil

[profees]

cheers for the replys i found the info about the eyes quite interesting never really thought about that before cones rods etc... makes sense now.

[profees]

So LET me get this right you are say that dso'ers add colour. im just kidding just thought i would start a ruck......

[661-pete]

For anyone who may be not into imaging themselves and a bit puzzled...

Many CCD cameras are monochrome only, though one-shot colour models are increasingly coming into the field: I'm certain many astroimagers who use CCD (I'm not one) stick with the mono camera. With that, all you ever get is a greyscale image. You can shoot several images through different filters: RGB or narrowband whatever suits, but you'll end up with a set of different greyscale images. Then, in a sense, you have to re-create the colours when combining the images in the processing. Whether this counts as 'adding colour' is a moot point. In a sense the colour is there in the original.

[Whippy]

Personally, I view my imaging kit as a 'bionic' eye which enables me to see objects and detail far beyond what I can see. This also includes colour although colour contrast double stars like Albeiro and Almach look far better through the eyepiece. The majority of images that come straight from the camera don't look hugely different from what you see in the eyepiece but stacking the images and processing in programs in Photoshop enables you to pull out the faint detail and colour you see. Images you see done stating 'false colour' are using narrowband filters to create images that bear no resemblence to any accurate colour colour representation.

Tony..

[661-pete]

Another thing I dimly remember from my student days (in the 1960s) and doing the 'serious' astronomy module - one of the exercises we had set was doing photometry and determining star colour indexes from the Palomar Sky Survey plates. For that we were provided with separate negative prints from the red and blue plates, to work on (visual photometry is much easier done using negatives). The negative prints, although representing 'red' and 'blue', were of course greyscale. I never saw anything in colour throughout the course. And negatives of colour images look horrible (I've tried)!