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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 n
by randomwalker 17y ago
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 17y agoThe 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.
- hvs 17y agoWell, 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).
- hvs 17y agoThey 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.