Ari Heinze's Photo Gallery -- CCD images of M27, the Dumbbell Nebula

	Cropped image, bright		Uncropped image, bright
	Cropped image, darker		Uncropped image, darker
	Detail, bright		Detail, darker

These images were all made from the same data. The only differences are in the processing: how their brightness values were scaled and how they were cropped. My personal favorite is the faint, cropped image, because the nebula looks transparent, as it really is, and because you can see how the inner, bright region looks like the outline of a weightlifter's dumbbell. This brightest part of the nebula is what would be most obvious if you were looking through a telescope eyepiece: hence the nebula's name. Besides allowing each viewer to choose a favorite, the multiple images illustrate the flexibility of CCD image data, which is considerably greater than that of image data from an ordinary digital camera. Astronomical CCDs store the image brightness values with greater precision than consumer-grade digital cameras, giving the person processing the data a great deal of control of how the image will eventually look.