Astronomical Image Processing


NGC 7000                 Stereo Pair

Digitized Sky Survey II, Wide Field

09/10/05 Image Notes:
Earlier in the week I was reading up on the image processing methods employed by the skillful folks who make the Hubble Heritage images. They had a section on art, and I came across some 3D HST images created by Inaka Akira. There were the typical red/blue anaglyphs, a technique that is very easy to achieve but which doesn't yield very impressive results when applied to a color image. But I was very impressed with his stereo images, and his work inspired me to try the technique myself. I experimented with a few different images throughout the week, and found that I got the best results when applying the technique to an image with lots of nebulosity. So yesterday when I made the strangely colored ngc7000, I thought I'd spark it up a bit by turning it into a stereo image, as you can see below.

ngc7000-left.jpg (173477 bytes)ngc7000-right.jpg (171183 bytes)

At this point you may be asking, what the heck is a stereo image, and how do I view it? I recommend free viewing (no special equipment required), which is explained in detail here. In a nutshell, since the above is a cross-viewing pair, you need to cross your eyes and look at the image (you should see double at first), then relax your eyes and let them drift until the two images merge as one, and voila, you will see dept in the image! Okay, it's not really that easy at first, but most folks can learn to do it. You may find that it is easier to view in the parallel viewing method (also described in detail in the link above). If you view the above set in parallel rather than cross viewing, what should look close looks far, and what should look far looks close. For example, in this image I made the center of the nebula and its star distant, some of the golden colored nebulosity closer, the dark dust clouds closer still, and the bright yellow star closest of all. If you see these distances reversed, then you are viewing parallel. If you don't see them at all, well, keep working at it! It really is worth it to learn to free view stereo images!!

One final note, this is purely an artistic rendition; in other words, I do not know the actual distances of the different parts of this object, so the distances I created are ficticious. I am working on a more accurate version of the Pleiades, but that's for another time...


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Page last updated 09/11/2005

Created by C. Gino