Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:49:53 -0600, "Jorge R. Frank"
wrote:

Indeed, NASA does the same thing with Hubble images - most of them are
false-color, with contrast exaggerated.

Sure. The "cheat" in the case of most space art is displaying objects
with color in what is intended as a naked eye rendition. If we were
actually in one of these scenes, with a normally lit planet surface,
moons, etc, things like nearby nebulas and galaxies wouldn't show much,
if any, color. But that wouldn't make for so striking an image, so the
fiction is tolerable in most cases.
_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com
Also the false coloring is used to show different bands of radiation,
like red/green/blue for three different Infrared channels,
or show different colors for hydrogen/oxygen/etc detected.
Those pictures are no fake, and show useful scientific info.
And they look nice to