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Old December 20th 18, 12:22 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Davoud[_1_]
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Default Let's Photograph Comet 46P Wirtanen

hleopold:
That is very nice. Is it that green in reality, or as close to reality as we
normally get?


Chris L Peterson:
Well, "reality" is that this isn't bright enough to stimulate color
vision, so the "real" color is gray.


What it would look like if it were brighter, or our eyes more
sensitive, isn't a simple question. The gamut of the sensor in the
camera is quite different from that of our eyes. The color is coming
from several fairly narrow emission lines produced by CN and C2. Those
lines lie in violet, blue, cyan, and green parts of the spectrum.
Because they are emission lines and not a continuum, the color that
gets rendered by any camera is very sensitive to the bandpass of the
RGB filters in that camera, and their crossover points. So different
images of the comet will show a range of colors, typically from the
blue side of cyan to the green side.


As I said! Aqua blue in one pic, green in the next. Take your pick,
flip a coin.

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