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.
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.
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).
They generally pick blue for the shorter wavelengths and red for the longer wavelengths. This corresponds with human eye, its just that most of the wavelengths fall out of the visual spectrum. I don't think that is arbitrary.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
