Vaporwave Crescent

Shooting space with a monochrome camera means using various filters—when choosing narrowband filters (those with only a few nanometers of bandpass) one can limit the sensor capturing only very specific wavelengths of light, namely the emissions of certain gasses (basically, glowing or lit up space dust).

Combining monochrome captures from two or three of these gasses (or many more, e.g. the JWST has 29 available bandpass filters) into color images is called “narrowband combination” and because it's false color anyway there's no limit to creativity when it comes to choosing color palettes.

You'll often see a honey-yellow and ocean-blue combination, which is referred to as the “Hubble palette” because it was extensively pioneered and used on many Hubble Space Telescope images (such as the Pillars of Creation).

But… in this widefield view of the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus I've made the gasses assume a retro 1980s “Vaporwave” look. Because why not?

Also in the frame is the Soap Bubble nebula which was only discovered in about 2007 by amateur astronomers. (Try to find it in the wide-field image!)

Click or tap to enlarge/double-tap to zoom

Total exposure time: 12h 40m (45,600s)
Image resolution: 8,203px × 5,546px (1.919″/px)
Shot from my driveway near Tucson, AZ in June 2022

Telescope: William Optics RedCat 51 (250mm focal length ƒ/4.9)
Camera: ZWO ASI294MM Pro
Filters: ZWO 7nm narrowband filters in Sulphur-II, Hydrogen alpha and Oxygen-III, ZWO RGB filters
Mount: iOptron CEM26

Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Fuchs. All rights reserved. You're free to use any of my images as wallpaper on your computer or phone. For other uses, including commercial use, derivative works or republishing, please contact me at thomas@slash7.com.