Re: [APML] Science in Astrophotos

[Matt BenDaniel <matt@starmatt.com>]

At 02:18 PM 2/13/2002 -0600, Frank Schiffel wrote:
>the exact color of an object does nothing except create a pretty picture on a computer. nice, might be art, but not science. 

Frank,

I highly recommend that you read David Malin's book Colours of the Stars or Colours of the Galaxies. Plenty of scientific discovery has been made through color imagery in: interstellar reddening, star temperature and chemistry, nebula structure, and star populations in galaxies. 

For example, my friend Wil Milan is working on a master's thesis, gathering CCD data with narrowband filters. His line of research is that the relative levels of color in nebulae can provide strong cues as to their type. This data can be computer processed to provide initial selection criteria for many objects in the field of view. The power of this method is that each object need only be one pixel large in size, facilitating wide fields surveys of nebulae in other galaxies. When these data are presented as color images, they look nice, too.

That said, >95% of the folks on the APML are not doing science.
--
Matt BenDaniel
http://starmatt.com


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