Science & Technology

This term in Mr William’s Year 10 Astrophysics class, students have been learning how to manipulate images of space gathered by satellites to turn them into something which is more reflective of what we would typically see produced by space agencies such as NASA. The following has been written by Bass Olsen.

X-Ray Vision: Seeing into Space

There are some objects in space that cannot be viewed with the naked eye. However, with the help of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Satellite, X-ray images can be taken of these objects and enable scientists to study them. X-ray images are colourless, and so NASA uses a photo editing program to easily recognise features in the images.

Each X-ray image has different frequencies, and a colour is assigned to each X-ray energy band. The RGB system is used, with red being assigned to the lowest frequency, green to the middle frequencies and blue for the highest. 

We used the GIMP graphics editor to edit X-ray images taken by the Chandra Satellite, assigning the colours to each image and combining them into a single image. Here is an image of the Eta Carinae nebula which I edited (left), together with the image edited by NASA (right)