Dave Green
The Crab Nebula at 347 GHz observed with SCUBA on the JCMT
Many colour schemes used to display astronomical intensity images do not have an underlying increase in the perception of the brightness of the colours used (e.g. burning out to red for the high data values, but using yellow/green for intermediate data values, which are perceived as being brighter than the red).
Dave Green, of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, has implemented the cubhelix colour scheme which is intended to be perceived as increasing in intensity. The scheme goes from black to white, deviating away from a pure greyscale (i.e., the diagonal from black to white in a colour cube) using a tapered helix in the colour cube, while ensuring a continuous increase in perceived intensity. As a result the scheme prints as a monotonically increasing greyscale on black and white PostScript devices.
Further details on the schemes can be found at the cubehelix website and in the report: Green, D. A., 2011, A colour scheme for the display of astronomical intensity images, Bulletin of the Astronomical Society of India, 39, p289 (ADS link).
The filenames here encode the parameters used to produce the
scheme: for the default scheme, ch05m151010 uses
a start colour of blue-red (05), uses −1.5 rotations (m15),
a hue parameter of 1.0 (10) and gamma of 1.0 (10). Other
combinations can be assessed on the
cubehelix website.
Public domain, citation requested: See details and XML record.