[Osmium]

> or to know what the mapping is

Agreed! This is important. Scale bars would be nice too, as well as info on other pre-/post-processing. Usually all this is in an associated publication (which is hopefully freely available), since it usually takes a surprising amount of information to fully understand an image like this.

> beauty is lost on me > pretty picture

Pick one ;) Sometimes we can find things beautiful without fully understanding them (arguably this is always the case). For me, knowing whether it’s derived from real measurements is what matters. But everyone’s threshold is different. I’ve seen beautiful simulated data too, but that’s something different again — more like the beauty of an equation to me.

[TeMPOraL]

I think it boils down to two things (at least it does for me):

- If the picture is shown as if it was a photo, how similar is it to what I'd see if I were magically transported in a spacesuit into object's vicinity?

- If the picture is an obvious false-color render, does it have a reasonable color map, or some "artist's impression"?