M16, The Eagle Nebula (False Color)

COMMENTS
The night of July 26-27 I went to the Lick Observatory as a volunteer for their Public Music event. I was the only one out of 8 amateur astronomers doing imaging, but that was actually cool. While the visitors had fun peeking at the other people's scopes, they asked questions about how to take photos of nebulas and deep sky objects.

I spent the night imaging only the Eagle nebula - I figured I'd choose a famous and bright object, so I'd have something to show on the screen on my red-filtered laptop from just one raw image - which I did and it looked pretty nice.

This image is one of two (the other one is here) resulting from the processing. Here I forced certain crhomatic ranges to become yellowish, giving the image a nice (but false) narrobanding effect. Please note that I have not painted the photo!! It was all done by adjusting the curves of certain chromatic ranges, that's all. I don't really like to transform colors - I'd much rather show what the camera gives, but this was more of an experiment than anything else. Visually I think it came up beautifully, though, but again, you won't see me doing this very often, if at all.