I like to point out that we are blind to the extraordinarily common "colors" of nitrogen gas and water vapor, blindness which is beneficial, because otherwise we'd constantly stumble through fog until we go over the edge of a cliff or get eaten by a tiger.
Yet if some aliens insisted that our planet was a very boring featureless nitrogen-colored ball, we would probably object that their viewing strategy is naive and incorrect.
We are born seeing the universe based on pragmatic decisions about signal versus noise. Our evolved tuning utterly fails in new places, so we should pick new tunings.
To the unaided human eye, space is largely a muted void. Stars pierce through the darkness like pinholes in velvet, but much of the grand tapestry—the swirling colors of nebulae, the fiery birthplaces of stars, the delicate filaments of distant galaxies—are invisible. Our vision, evolved for survival under a sunlit sky and on a green-blue Earth, isn’t tuned to perceive the vast electromagnetic chorus the universe sings in.
Although space may appear subdued to our eyes, that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful—only that we need to borrow better eyes to truly see it
Images are not real, whether astronomical or not...the colours coming from your display or printout have a very different spectrum from that of the real object
A bit of a tangent, but this excerpt from a Sam Kriss rant about science content on social media always stuck with me:
Those multicoloured nebulae are not real objects, they exist only in fantastic pictures overlaid with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s face and some vague sentiments about how wonderful the universe is when it’s very far away from human life. The images are digitally stitched together, the colours are fake, the shapes are not anything that could actually be seen out the window of your spaceship, a real-life nebula is about as exciting as a damp fog.
There is a wonderful book about this very thing: “Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime” — from the description: “Elizabeth A. Kessler examines the Hubble’s deep space images, highlighting the remarkable resemblance they bear to nineteenth-century paintings and photographs of the American West and their invocation of the visual language of the sublime.” https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816679577/picturing-the-cosmo...
I've seen the sun described as being really mostly white and that the yellow color we normally see has more to do with what light makes it through the atmosphere rather than the actual color of the star and that the light is a continuous spectrum and so on. But then the sun is also classified as a G-2, a yellow dwarf. Is the color that we see in the sky just coincidentally match the color the star is classified under?
Honestly, every time I see these space images, I feel like they’re not quite real. The colors seem too vivid, maybe even enhanced. The shapes look a little too perfect to be natural. But still, whenever I see a nebula or a spiral galaxy, something inside me stirs. It’s like eating an Oreo. You know it’s not exactly “natural,” but you still quietly eat two, maybe three. Maybe these aren’t images of the real universe, but they awaken something very real in me.
That sounds a lot like dodging the question. Obviously correcting for things like red shifts, camera limitations etc is fine. But as far as I know there are many instances where the coloring is pushed beyond anything remotely realistic. I think the pillars of creation are a popular example
I understand the necessity to approximate colors, but this article doesn't really explain the answer to the question. How much of the colors are simulated?
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