I can’t understand what are the true colors of various different space photos. I know that they are colorized, but how? How human eye could see space, galaxies and everything “in person”? I can’t comprehend it
In: Planetary Science
Most of the light we can see from outer space looks monochrome, because it’s too faint to distinguish any colors in it.
As far as false color goes, [here’s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nStTITWNO8o) an explanation of how it works (the dazzling “Hubble palette” is at the end)
If you go outside on a clear night far from the city you can see the Milky Way and Andromeda.
They’re very pale and faint, difficult to discern at all. If there’s a nearby light source you won’t be able to see the Milky Way at all, and that’s saying a lot considering you’re inside it.
So the answer is you normally wouldn’t see anything at all for these very large structures. They’re so massive and diffuse that you’re never “close” to them even when you’re literally within one of them.
Only with huge mirrors collecting light for hours can we generate a crisp image of them.
A lot of telescopes also function in wavelengths humans can’t see, and so those pictures are adjusted into visible light wavelengths for your comprehension.
They’re false colored because the instruments they’re using to image are often taking data in wavelengths not visible to the human eye. There’s a lot of interesting phenomena and information that is only observable in non-visible wavelengths. So when they publish the images they remap these other wavelengths into visible colors.
So what the “true colors” are, meaning what they would look like to our eyes isn’t nearly as important or interesting to the scientists taking the data.
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A lot of astronomical imaging is done in wavelengths of light/radiation that humans can’t see. Microwaves, radio waves, x-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, etc. The visible spectrum that humans can see is a relatively small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The “true colors” are very often beyond the range of what humans can see. So the information from the imaging devices is converted into colors that humans can see. Sometimes the colors used are chosen to make the prettiest composition, to show to the public and get them interested in science. Other times the colors are chosen to make scientific analysis of the subject easier.
If you’ve ever seen images taken from a thermal camera, the concept is the same thing. Humans can’t see the infrared light that thermal imaging devices use to tell how hot something is. So the thermal camera’s electronics convert the invisible light they’re detecting into an image that we can see and make sense of.
The vast majority of the light in the universe is colored with X rays, Alpha/Beta/Gamma rays, Infrared and Ultraviolet, Radio and Microwaves
So when scientists take a picture of a distant nebula, most of it wouldn’t actually look like much of anything to your eyes. But if you assign each different kind of invisible light a color our eyes can recognize, they are artificially colored, but it makes it easier to make out details
Also think about what you see in the night sky. Arcturus is a red giant and appears orangish to the naked eye. Spica is a bluish-white star. Mars looks rusty in a telescope. The human eye is capable of seeing the color of stellar objects in certain situations.
You know how a man and a woman can sing the exact same song but at very different pitches? Also you know how dog whistles are too high-pitched for us to hear but dogs can hear them just fine (duh)?
The light captured in space photos is too “low/high pitched” for us to see, and false colour photos are sort of just moving the “pitches” up or down to push them into the range we can see.
I’ve ended up researching this way to long because I could never actually get a straight answer. Most of what you could see would be grey-ish white much like wispy a cloud in space. A lot of it wouldn’t be visible at all though. It’s like trying to see gasses in our atmosphere, or spectral waves outside the visual spectrum. They’re so spread apart we can’t really view anything.
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