High quality images

Isn't that image beautiful?  

When Swift was selected by Popular Science 

as one of the best new things in 2005, 

my picture even made it into a national magazine.

Yes, I cringe every time I see that image.  You know what?  That was the very first color image I made as a graduate student.  We had just started observing SN2005cs in M51 with Swift and I was told (on short notice probably) that I needed to give a report at the daily science planning meeting.  I had made a pretty decent image but had not had to share it yet, so I just made a quick screen shot on my computer, posted it to our online wiki where the others could see it, and didn't think much more of it.  Apparently some time later they wanted a cool picture from Swift ( and gamma ray and x-ray telescopes don't make that pretty of images) so someone took this picutre and forwarded it on.  Eventually it made it into a press release and Popular Science before I even knew about it.

I like to think my images look better now. I actually make the images the same why I did that one -- loading them into the red,green,blue color channels of ds9.  The difference is printing them as higher resolution postscript images after filling the screen to get the maximum number of pixels. Here is my latest version of M51.  Bonus points to whoever discovers the anacronism.