Crimson & Teal & Violet

Teal (hue 180°, the exact cool midpoint) and Violet (hue 270°, the most spectrally extreme visible color) are 90° apart — a wide split-complementary arc spanning from the pure cool midpoint to the edge of the visible spectrum. The combination of Teal's dark, vivid, balanced cool with Violet's deep, electric, spectrally-extreme quality creates the most psychedelic and most visually intense cool pair. Against Crimson's passionate dark red, the full visible spectrum is represented in a compressed, intensely saturated form.

The palette is the visual world of the Hubble Space Telescope's most iconic images — specifically the Pillars of Creation (Eagle Nebula — M16, Messier 16 — located approximately 6,500-7,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens Cauda, in the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy). The Hubble palette: the deep vivid crimson of the hydrogen-alpha emission (the specific deep-crimson emission line of ionized hydrogen — H-alpha at 656.3 nm wavelength — the most fundamental and most pervasive emission in all star-forming regions, produced when hydrogen atoms transition from the n=3 to n=2 energy level, releasing a photon at the specific crimson-red wavelength); the dark vivid teal of the oxygen-III emission (O-III — doubly-ionized oxygen — at 500.7 nm, in the teal-to-green range — the most common doubly-ionized emission in planetary nebulae and in the hot gas around massive young stars); and the deep electric violet of the hydrogen-beta emission and short-wavelength ultraviolet-to-violet nebular emission recorded in the most processed Hubble images.