File:LHA 120-N 44 Superbubble X-rays Only (39335704582).png

English: I've posted x-rays only a few other times, but this time it's in color. The same Twitter thread that taught me how to get rid of the noise also taught me how to separate the energy levels so that I can make a color image. Here, red represents softer x-rays, while blue represents harder ones. Green lies between. I haven't studied x-ray astronomy to know much more about it. It takes a village, and I am but one woman... Anyway, hopefully a three-color x-ray image is more interesting than a one-color image.

For the smoothing, I used simple Gaussian blur filters with Photoshop. The brightest areas have only a 2px blur, while the dimmest areas have up to a 64px blur. So there are six levels of blur: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 pixels each. Only the brightest parts of each blur layer are visible, and the masks themselves are smooth so that the transitions between each blur level are smooth. I can largely automate the process, but I find that I need to manually adjust the weight of the masks for the areas with the smaller blurs until it looks right. This is probably a pretty terrible way to do this, but I don't know a better way at this point.

There is an article at the Chandra website regarding this object and what is being illustrated. You may read it here, if you wish: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/n1929/

The Chandra+Hubble version is here: https://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?short=22Yo4YR

The Hubble only version is here: https://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?short=21xLgJx

Data from Observation ID 3356 from Proposal Number 03910326 were used to create this image. X-ray Emission Mechanisms and Evolution of Superbubbles

Red: .30-.95 keV Green: .95-2.87 keV Blue: 2.87-7.00 keV

North is NOT up. It is 19.6° counter-clockwise from up.