In message , Pat Flannery
writes


OM wrote:

...The problem there is that the design of JWST is flawed in the fact
that it's not intended to work in the visible spectrum, which is where
the "holy ****!!!" pictures are truly born than catch the attention of
Joe Punchclock, Ethyl Soapsjunkie and Hipster Treehugger and make them
go "holy ****!!!' and for a brief time get addicted enough to know
full well you don't **** with your pusher and they should quit
bitching about their tax dollars going to NASA.




Of course the "holy ****" pictures really come out of the NASA photo
labs after the exaggerated and false colors are added to the really
pretty bland Hubble pictures to make them look cool- a process that hit
some sort of apex with this shot, which made it look like the HST was
peering deep into Mordor:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ima...rglass_big.gif
The public is under the impression that if Hubble had an eyepiece on it
that they could look into like a backyard telescope, they would see
things that looked like this, but although the detail would be there,
the color wouldn't be.


But if you look at _any_ photograph of a deep sky object you see it much
brighter than it really is. We don't have colour vision at that light
level, but the colours are there and usually very pure - they are from a
line spectrum.
The colours in pictures are either an approximation to the actual
colours as seen through Hubble's filters, or, more frequently, selected
for aesthetic and technical reasons and "false" in that sense. In
particular, they often use green for the red hydrogen-alpha light.
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