
Space Doesn't Really Look Like That - Hagelin
http://www.appscout.com/2009/09/hubble_space_doesnt_really_loo.php
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randomwalker
Hasn't this been beaten to death? The human visual system evolved to see
things of a human scale, and the visible part of the spectrum is
correspondingly very narrow. If you want any kind of visual representation of
space or of atomic structures, you pretty much have to assign colors more-or-
less arbitrarily. I don't think the term false-color is applicable here,
because that assumes that a true color exists.

~~~
ars
The point is if you actually went and looked at the area, it won't look to you
like hubble shows it.

People don't fully realize the colors mean different atoms, and are not the
actual colors you will see.

He's not trying to say we shouldn't do this. Just, like the title says, "Space
doesn't look like that".

It only matters when they pick colors for aesthetic purposes. The photo of
uranus is very obviously false color, but the colors of the first photo were
chosen to look pretty, rather than convey information.

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hvs
Well, he does seem to want to portray it as dishonest when he says:

    
    
      There's a dirty little secret when it comes to the
      stunning images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope.
      ...
      The scientists connected with Hubble take liberties no
      journalist would ever get away with--though in the name 
      of science.
    

For one thing, it says it right in the name "false color image". There is no
deception here. For another, journalists _regularly_ print these images. So,
technically, they have no qualms about it either (and they shouldn't).

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yardie
Space doesn't look like that, pathogens don't look like that, atoms don't look
like that. There is a reason it's called false color photographs. The real
thing is quite bland and the human eye has only evolved so far.

Outside of the scientific community, the photographs have very limited value.
The meaty information is in radio telescopes, but the oscillation of the
magnitude of stars doesn't sell newspapers and people like to know (or think
they know) what they are paying for.

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Raphael
Yeah, the eye can't do a super long exposure either. This is why we have
tools, to enhance what we are capable of.

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tybris
I know that, and I choose to ignore it and stand in awe of the structures in
which our entire world would fit a gazillion times.

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embeddedradical
The first comment on the page by Krischan is right on:

 _Space DOES really look like that. If you have the right set of eyes. Hubble
and its team just prove this with every picture.

So it does not look like it would look to you naked eye? Nice thing that human
eyes are not the standard. Put in some false colours to offset their failure._

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ComputerGuru
Wait, so what _does_ it look like when viewed with filters that limit it to
the visible spectrum?

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hvs
It depends. If you point it at Mars, it would be reddish. If you point it at
other things, they would be different colors depending on their chemical
makeup. The problem is that most of the radiation given off by objects is not
in the visible spectrum, so the images would be much less vibrant. The would
generally be dull gray blobs.

~~~
jerf
The correct solution, of course, is not to start shipping out dull grey blobs
to journalists, but to upgrade the human eye.

(I'm keeping a close eye (hurr hurr) on the efforts to provide artificial
retinas. Progress may not seem like it's going that quickly, but there's no
reason to think that they won't hit parity with human eyes (in most ways
anyhow), then zip right on past parity.)

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angstrom
To be fair, even what we consider the visible spectrum is subjective. We
assign names to specific wavelengths, but that doesn't mean our brains
interpret them the same way. Just ask someone that's colorblind.

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wkdown
They don't assign colors based on wavelength, but on chemical composition.

 _nitrogen (red), hydrogen (green), oxygen (blue), and helium (violet)._ (via
Hubblesite)[[http://www.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2000/0...](http://www.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2000/07/image/a)]

