The Milky Way Project Talk

Noticing of massive IRDCs

  • Arralen by Arralen

    Infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) are obviously hard to spot - in fact, it's rather that you don't spot anything that gives them away.
    With the pic below, the lower star density made me curious, so I cranked up the gamma setting on my monitor, but it didn't help much. Only when I drew the "strange things" box over the picture, the orange overlay gave away the dark structure of the massive IRDC that spans nearly the whole picture ... .
    Therefore my suggestion: add a button to invert the picture, or do some coloured overlay, or something similar, to make spotting of some structures easier !!
    AMW0000ziw

    Posted

  • Arralen by Arralen

    PS:
    Note that there's a bunch of faint small bubbles, knots and fuzzy red objects at what seems the edge of the massive dark cloud! Didn't some say these clouds "are possible sites of high-mass star formation and are of great interest to researchers"? 😉

    (It's a shame our markings are not shown here, so I have to wait 'til I can upload a pic that I altered with GIMP to make things more obvious ..)

    Posted

  • chairstar by chairstar

    I personally detect at least 10 areas that I could see myself marking individually, or upon even MORE intense scrutiny - I can see evidence that they could be interconnected clumps.

    This is one that would definately be rough for me to classify! Goods eyes folks :}

    Posted

  • Zeroghost by Zeroghost

    Try "equalize" in Photoshop if you can. Any small variations will become clear. You might see structure too subtle to notice. I don't know where that is in Gimp, but it is under IMAGE/ADJUSTMENT (very bottom in CS4 Ext) in Photoshop.

    Posted