http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/openFITS/

Wow. This was incredibly timely. Thanks for the link!

i just use "nip2" and have imagemagick api interface open the fitt as a 32bit float
combine the 3 bands and export
-- or --
open them in Cinepaint

i can NOT wait until Gimp supports 16bit/layer images

the next major release should

Is GIMP really going to start supporting 16 bit images? There's been a lot of talk about that but it just doesn't seem to be happening...

supposedly the gimp 3.0 will BUT gimp2.6 was also supposedly the last 2 version .the current is 2.6.10

I played a bit with combining Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer images together. I used the raw data available on the websites to rework the images so that the filters in the respective bands are ordered (R-->B : long wavelength --> short wavelength). This is a different palette than was used for many of the released images.

As described in the tutorial, I used a Hue/Saturation layer to colorize the grayscale images and then used "Screen" blending mode rather than loading into the RGB channels. That gave an interesting effect that might be useful for adding bonus channels in planetary images....


Links to images on my flickr site:

Cassiopeia A supernova remnant (Spitzer/Hubble/Chandra): http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/4842001649/

E0102 supernova remnant in the Small Magellenic Cloud (Spitzer/Hubble/ + Halpha (orange) + [OIII] (blue-green)): http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/4839139715/