annee24004 — Announcement
Celebrating Cosmic Wonders: Analyzing NOIRLab’s Rosette Nebula Anniversary Image
2 November 2024: In celebration of its fifth anniversary, NSF NOIRLab recently released a dazzling new image of the Rosette Nebula, taken with the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF NOIRLab. Part of what makes the image so striking are the contrasting colors swirling in ethereal layers around the nebula’s center. So it may surprise you to learn that the raw data from the camera hold no information about the light’s colors at all. In fact, all the camera captures is light intensity. “Each pixel in the camera is like a little solar panel,” explains Travis Rector, an astronomer and image processing specialist who leads the production of many NOIRLab images. “The pixel just knows how much light is hitting it, and the more light that hits it the …