4 ms·

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most astronomy photos colorized (and not actually such vivid colors in real life).

bognition 4y ago
Yes. The photon collectors on JWT detect infra red which is not visible to humans.
banana_giraffe 4y ago
Yes. Or rather, it's a color palette mapping whatever range of the EM spectrum the image is gathered with to something we humans can see. And yes, sometimes the mapping is done to make things look nice.
jacquesm 4y ago
Absolutely, these objects would be completely invisible when using visible light so it is all false color, just like a FLIR would show you an image of the infra red light emitted by an object by shifting it to a spectrum that you can directly perceive.
deanCommie 4y ago
What is real life? What are vivid colors? All electromagnetic radiation is the same. In the sense that every proton/neutron is the same. But adding a few more protons/neutrons creates an entirely new element, with entirely new chemical properties. From something simple come incredibly new powerful behaviours. So just as Iron is massively different from Plutonium, Microwaves are massively different from Gamma rays. What we call "colors", or "visible light" is not particularly special, except to us, and our specific human biology. It feels more real because it's visible to us, but it's not on the grand scale of the universe. What we're observing through these telescopes isn't a dog chasing a ball. We're seeing stuff billions of light years away, millions of light years in size, billions of years ago. Passing by trillions of other stars and planets on the way. These objects are emitting a gargantuan amount of information. Why should we only present the information that happens to be in the same subset as what our primitive primate vision cones can process? So, no, if you were to teleport to the nebula/galaxy that we're showing images for, it wouldn't look exactly like that to your human eyes. Instead, what you're seeing is what a god with perfect vision of the universe would see. You're seeing the universe for what it is, not just the part of it that is presented to humans.

Yes. The photon collectors on JWT detect infra red which is not visible to humans.

Yes. Or rather, it's a color palette mapping whatever range of the EM spectrum the image is gathered with to something we humans can see. And yes, sometimes the mapping is done to make things look nice.

jacquesm 4y ago

Absolutely, these objects would be completely invisible when using visible light so it is all false color, just like a FLIR would show you an image of the infra red light emitted by an object by shifting it to a spectrum that you can directly perceive.

deanCommie 4y ago

What is real life? What are vivid colors? All electromagnetic radiation is the same. In the sense that every proton/neutron is the same. But adding a few more protons/neutrons creates an entirely new element, with entirely new chemical properties. From something simple come incredibly new powerful behaviours. So just as Iron is massively different from Plutonium, Microwaves are massively different from Gamma rays. What we call "colors", or "visible light" is not particularly special, except to us, and our specific human biology. It feels more real because it's visible to us, but it's not on the grand scale of the universe. What we're observing through these telescopes isn't a dog chasing a ball. We're seeing stuff billions of light years away, millions of light years in size, billions of years ago. Passing by trillions of other stars and planets on the way. These objects are emitting a gargantuan amount of information. Why should we only present the information that happens to be in the same subset as what our primitive primate vision cones can process? So, no, if you were to teleport to the nebula/galaxy that we're showing images for, it wouldn't look exactly like that to your human eyes. Instead, what you're seeing is what a god with perfect vision of the universe would see. You're seeing the universe for what it is, not just the part of it that is presented to humans.