Interesting stuff - thanks for the link. My pre-architecture design classes and later design studios in graduate school included a lot of color studies. I'm not convinced that anyone who commented in that forum has the correct answer. The science, art, psychology and philosophy of color are both subjective AND objective - too complex for definitive statements one way or the other. I favor the artistic and philosophical attributes of color, but that is probably more a product of my training. If I were a physical scientist my interests and opinions would certainly be different. Regarding astrophotography, if we only produced images that are true to what we see, almost all objects would appear white, with very little color. I like to try to produce wide-field images that are true to what my eyes see, or at least my memory of the scene. But I think that deep sky images are more interesting in the colors that film or digital media record. When digital astrophotography was still very new, I had many objections to all of the Photoshop processing necessary to produce any kind of image, particularly in color. I felt it was all too "fake." As it has become necessary for me to use digital photography for work I have become much more comfortable with it. If you think about it, photography is really very abstract, anyway. I'm not as bothered anymore about the choices that we have to make in image processing, to enhance colors, contrast, or anything that we might do to create a pleasing image. BTW, I have noticed that I don't see as much color in low surface brightness objects as I did 20 years ago. I can still see some pinks and blues in objects such as M8 and M42, and I still see OIII emissions as very blue-green, such as NGC 6543. But astrophotos of these objects that approximate what I can see would probably not be very interesting. Might be an interesting exercise, though. Kim -----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of David Rankin Sent: Friday, August 27, 2010 11:34 AM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: [Utah-astronomy] Color in space continuation I posted this subject on a digital astrophotography forum I frequent. Got a lot of interesting replies if anyone is interested in reading it. Still an active topic. http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/4005163/pag e/0/view/collapsed/sb/5/o/all/fpart/1 Cheers, David _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com