To anyone wondering how the sausage is made I recommend this video [1] by Nebula Photos who reprocessed the same raw data that NASA used to create the released

To anyone wondering how the sausage is made I recommend this video [1] by Nebula Photos who reprocessed the same raw data that NASA used to create the released nebula picture. At around 19m he talks about how he arranges the images in layers based on the wavelength of the filter that was used during its capture. About false color... Real things in the universe have real color -- they emit light in a variety of wavelengths -- even when that color is outside of the perceptual range of your eyes. The colorized photos like the ones released by NASA or Nebula Photos just expose the real relative color differences present in the original data, just shifted into a range that is you are able to perceive. "false color" images are definitely not someone taking a colored pencil to a black and white photo of a nebula and "coloring it in" to look nice, the colors are actually meaningful and give you more information about everything that the telescope actually detected than what a black and white photo could show alone. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVuonz26P0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVuonz26P0w