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The Ring Nebula, processed using Iris

How this image was created

• Images were obtained from the Faulkes Telescope Online Training website
• Using this tutorial with Iris, the different colour channels were aligned ("co-registered"), white-balanced and then combined, to produce the final result.

Why don't telescopes use Colour cameras?

Sometimes they do! The advantge of taking separate colour channels is that the image has better resolution, and the astronomer can choose which wavelengths to image, in order to extract information about the object being studied. Nowadays, astronomy operates at multiple wavelengths, and being able to image at well-defined frequency bands helps astronomers understand far more than if they were just restricted to a pre-determined range as defined by a colour camera.

Having said this, one-shot colour cameras are extensively used by amateur astronomers, as they enable final colour shots to be taken many times more rapidly.