The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

Image generation is an important step in the modern astronomy data analysis workflow. It provides quick-look diagnostics on raw data or during the data reduction stages, enabling visual identification or classification of sources and features, and the presentation of the data to the larger scientific community. Traditionally, these images are created from stacking three (or more) scaled single band images as colour channels, in a standard RGB (sRGB) image. This technique belies the complexities of colour science and perception, where even the simplest of images require complex transformations between the input gamut from the camera sensors to the final output sRGB. In this talk, we present a method of combining any number of astronomical single band images into sRGB images using the Hue-Saturation-Value (HSV) colour space. This method produces output images that are more reflective of noise properties of the underlying data, better representative of details and features, more intuitive, and more visually appealing.