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How NASA Colorizes Hubble Images

Posted by chrisd on from the doing-right-what-turner-did-badly dept.

addie writes "The Ottawa Citizen among others is running a story about how NASA determines what colors to paint their latest Hubble pictures. I'm personally happier looking at a dramatic doctored image, especially when the B&W originals are available."

1 of 18 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Pseudocolor by mgarraha · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've looked at several nebulas and galaxies through telescopes, and yes, they are all basically grey. I think there is value in enhancing even a visible-light image to highlight important structural details. For example, in the mostly green Hubble PR image of the Eagle Nebula, they assigned the orange hydrogen-alpha emission line to the green channel so it would be easier to distinguish from the red sulfur ion emission line. Since conventional images of this nebula are typically orange, I wondered what the color mapping was. I agree that they should generally do a better job of explaining it, but I don't mind that they did it. Through a telescope I can't see the nebula at all, only the star cluster.