Calabash Nebula (2013)

Took a while to get this one done. This data is actually all red and infrared and mapped in a way that the shorter wavelengths are blue so it’s representative or false color—however you want to word that.

The blue outer shell is a very faint structure which barely shows up above the noise. I went ahead and used Photoshop’s noise reduction filter and a median filter on it. The median filter in particular is destructive and I haven’t ever used it on any Hubble images before. I decided since the shells were barely there anyway there wasn’t much to destroy.

The nebula itself is pretty neat. It’s also called the Rotten Egg because of its sulfur content. You don’t want to sniff it.

Red: hst_11580_08_wfc3_ir_f167n
Green: hst_11580_08_wfc3_ir_f110w
Blue: hst_08326_51_wfpc2_f791w_wf
Blue-green screen layer for the blue shells: hst_08326_50_wfpc2_f656n_wf

North is NOT up, it’s 43.9° counter-clockwise from up

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.