[mcantor]

This is basically irrelevant to the linked post, but I have to ask: Was I the only one who felt crushed, betrayed and crestfallen upon making the terrible realization that space doesn't actually look like all of the awesome "photos" floating around? Like the Eagle Nebula's "Pillars of Creation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula). Sure, that's technically what it "looks like," but the colors are all determined by the artistic license of whoever processed the X-ray information and composite photographs of light in the nonvisible spectrum.

Drat. :-(

[gojomo]

Just pretend your own eyes were more highly evolved, such that the spectacular synthetic colors of these photos are just a pale imitation of what your super-eyes could discern. After all, our eyes' visible range is merely what's proven useful for our native habitat.

[mcantor]

That's a good point. Maybe in another million years or so, my descendants will be space-faring badasses who have evolved hydrogen-sulphur-oxygen-vision because you don't want to run into a nascent galaxy while you're making an interstellar Taco Bell run at faster than the speed of light, and they will see space the way it looks in the Hubble photos, like God intended.

That makes me feel a little better.

[sigstoat]

Folks should keep this in mind when they get agitated about the possibility of NASA getting rid of Hubble. Basically all of your pretty space pictures are false color, so it doesn't matter which space telescope produces them.

[windsurfer]

How are the hubble's images any more "false color" than my digital SLR?

[gaius]

Because when you assign a visible colour to a particular invisible wavelength, you can choose whatever colour you like. If you went there and looked with the naked eye, you'd see just black.

[mcantor]

Exactly. Since when is space less awesome than we think it is?

[InclinedPlane]

You wouldn't just see black, you'd see a different set of colors, generally more muted than the false-color pictures from telescopes.

[sigstoat]

i don't think there is a single instrument on Hubble which is confined to the human visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, or any subset thereof. and i'd be amazed if duplicating the color response curves of the human eye was a design consideration.

unlike your DSLR (unless you popped the IR filter off of it).

[InclinedPlane]

The "pillars of creation" image does not contain x-ray data, I believe you misread something out of that wiki article in believing so. The particular image is not true color, but it's also not just a photoshop job, it represents a very real view of the Eagle nebula, just not one your human eyes could see.

For an actual true color (for humans) image of the Eagle nebula, try this: http://eaglenebula.net/astronomy/astrophotos/The_Eagle_Nebul...