During the recent “Stargazing Live” TV broadcast with Brian Cox the AAO telescope took an image “live” during the broadcast. In reality, much of the data for the photo had been gathered the previous night and they quickly finished processing it during the show. It was a photo of the Keyhole Nebula taken and processed by Angel R. Lopez-Sanchez who graciously provided me some details about the image.

Their image is stunning and deep, which is to be expected with a 12.7 meter telescope! But the colour is “false”, with separate narrowband filters mapped to various colour channels. It’s a nice palette and I’ll give it a go sometime This version I’ve done with my little backyard telescopes uses a colour camera to capture it’s natural-eye colouring. It’s one of the best I’ve managed so far I think, thanks to some recent equipment and software upgrades. I’m becoming slightly obsessed with this massive nebula and have imaged and re-imaged it over and over. It’s filled with amazing features and mysteries and in this single photo many of Hubble’s famous shots were taken.

Also you might have noticed during the Brian Cox “Stargazing Live”‘s third night they featured and discussed one of my false colour narrowband photos as well! I was super excited to be involved and it was a wonderful television event for Australian audiences.