true colors of space

Some years ago I remember reading online that real photos of space
galaxies, nebula, globular clusters, etc, are practically black and
white with very faint colors. In order to make the photos more appealing
to the human eye the colors are heavily intensified. Is this correct?
Thank you.

_SAIEW_ Space art and Illustration
http://www.art.eonworks.com/gallery/...gallery_1.html

EonWorks:

Some years ago I remember reading online that real photos of space
galaxies, nebula, globular clusters, etc, are practically black and
white with very faint colors. In order to make the photos more appealing
to the human eye the colors are heavily intensified. Is this correct?
Thank you.

Not necessarily. Some people like saturated images, some prefer more
muted color.

--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost everything that
you will say in your entire life.

usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm

On Dec 11, 4:27*am, EonWorks wrote:
Some years ago I remember reading online that real photos of space
galaxies, nebula, globular clusters, etc, are practically black and
white with very faint colors. In order to make the photos more appealing
to the human eye the colors are heavily intensified. Is this correct?
Thank you.

_SAIEW_ Space art and Illustrationhttp://www.art.eonworks.com/gallery/space/space_gallery_1.html

Color/hue saturations help us to identify those metallicity elements,
and that's a good thing.

Unfortunately, it seems our NASA/Apollo era was and still is
colorblind.

http://translate.google.com/#
Brad Guth, Brad_Guth, Brad.Guth, BradGuth, BG / “Guth Usenet”

On Dec 11, 7:27*am, EonWorks wrote:
Some years ago I remember reading online that real photos of space
galaxies, nebula, globular clusters, etc, are practically black and
white with very faint colors. In order to make the photos more appealing
to the human eye the colors are heavily intensified. Is this correct?
Thank you.

_SAIEW_ Space art and Illustrationhttp://www.art.eonworks.com/gallery/space/space_gallery_1.html

Adding color brings more life to a picture. The sky is black(space)
and stars like our sun we see as white dots.Hubble gives these dots
structure and color adds detail to this structure I just opened my
picture scrape book of the universe .The picture taken with the "Rosat
X-ray telescope of elliptical galaxy M87 to show its structurs in
detail it is done in three colors green,yellow and red. At its exact
center is a white dot. White dot is its core and like all elliptical
galaxies that white dot is a black hole. TreBert. PS M87 has the
incredible mass of over a trillion solar masses.(WOW)

On Dec 11, 5:30*am, "G=EMC^2" wrote:
On Dec 11, 7:27*am, EonWorks wrote:

Some years ago I remember reading online that real photos of space
galaxies, nebula, globular clusters, etc, are practically black and
white with very faint colors. In order to make the photos more appealing
to the human eye the colors are heavily intensified. Is this correct?
Thank you.

_SAIEW_ Space art and Illustrationhttp://www.art.eonworks.com/gallery/space/space_gallery_1.html

Adding color brings more life to a picture. The sky is black(space)
and stars like our sun we see as white dots.Hubble gives these dots
structure and color adds detail to this structure *I just opened my
picture scrape book of the universe .The picture taken with the "Rosat
X-ray telescope of elliptical galaxy M87 to show its structurs in
detail it is done in three colors green,yellow and red. At its exact
center is a white dot. White dot is its core and like all elliptical
galaxies that white dot is a black hole. TreBert. * PS M87 has the
incredible mass of over a trillion solar masses.(WOW)

And yet your friends of that NASA/Apollo Kodak era were colorblind.
Go figure.

On 11/12/2011 12:27, EonWorks wrote:
Some years ago I remember reading online that real photos of space
galaxies, nebula, globular clusters, etc, are practically black and
white with very faint colors. In order to make the photos more appealing
to the human eye the colors are heavily intensified. Is this correct?

Some might be somewhat colour saturation enhanced for effect, but the
main problem is that most objects have a surface brightness too faint to
trigger the human eye colour receptors. We see very faint stuff in
monochrome even when it is highly coloured.

If you look at Aldebaran, Betelgeuse and Rigel you can see stars that
span most of the range of star colours. There are a handful of extremely
red stars and many colour contrast double stars to look at too.

Gaseous nebulae are generally extremely colourful if you could only see
them in colour and modern CCDs record them pretty much as they really
are only brighter. Colour film could not and if you find old Palomar
slides nebulae are all pink and blue with no green. The dominant OIII
line emission wavelength was lost completely as it was the same as the
deep green safelight used for panchromatic films!

It wasn't until 1971 that someone did astrophotography with a truly
panchromatic and green sensitive film to produce true colour images that
represented what the human eye would see in colour if it was sensitive
enough. It made the cover of SciAm.

The only extended objects that are really bright enough to trigger human
colour vision are some of the more compact disk like planetary nebulae
which are sometimes apple green through a decent size scope.

You can sometimes see an oily green colour in the brightest parts of M42
through an 18" scope used at low magnification.

Thank you.

_SAIEW_ Space art and Illustration

Regards,
Martin Brown

On Sun, 11 Dec 2011 13:27:10 +0100, EonWorks wrote:

Some years ago I remember reading online that real photos of space
galaxies, nebula, globular clusters, etc, are practically black and
white with very faint colors. In order to make the photos more appealing
to the human eye the colors are heavily intensified. Is this correct?

This is not true... or more correctly, it's a misunderstanding based
on how things are sometimes done.

"Color" is a physiological phenomenon. Most objects that you see
astroimages of have little or no "color" for the simple reason that
the human eye isn't sensitive enough to turn the spectral information
that is inherently present into what our brains interpret as "color".
But that spectral information is real, and present. So-called "true
color" astroimages simply present an object in a way that approximates
how it would appear if our eyes were more sensitive. When an imager
plays with color saturation (mainly for aesthetic reasons), it is
really just the equivalent of changing the sensitivity of the virtual
eye of the observer.

Nearly everything in the Universe appears to our eyes in shades of
gray (and a telescope doesn't change this, as a telescope can't make
anything brighter than it is to the naked eye). But practically
nothing in the Universe is actually monochromatic. So an astroimage
made in a colorspace that approximates that of human perception (as
with red, green, and blue filters) is giving a more realistic view of
an object than it is possible to get with the eye alone.

On Dec 11, 6:00*am, Martin Brown
wrote:
On 11/12/2011 12:27, EonWorks wrote:

Some years ago I remember reading online that real photos of space
galaxies, nebula, globular clusters, etc, are practically black and
white with very faint colors. In order to make the photos more appealing
to the human eye the colors are heavily intensified. Is this correct?

Some might be somewhat colour saturation enhanced for effect, but the
main problem is that most objects have a surface brightness too faint to
trigger the human eye colour receptors. We see very faint stuff in
monochrome even when it is highly coloured.

That must have been the problem all along with our NASA/Apollo era,
whereas our physically dark moon was simply too dim, not only for the
human eye but also for the Kodak color eye.

http://translate.google.com/#
Brad Guth, Brad_Guth, Brad.Guth, BradGuth, BG / “Guth Usenet”

On Dec 11, 7:34*am, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Sun, 11 Dec 2011 13:27:10 +0100, EonWorks wrote:
Some years ago I remember reading online that real photos of space
galaxies, nebula, globular clusters, etc, are practically black and
white with very faint colors. In order to make the photos more appealing
to the human eye the colors are heavily intensified. Is this correct?

This is not true... or more correctly, it's a misunderstanding based
on how things are sometimes done.

"Color" is a physiological phenomenon. Most objects that you see
astroimages of have little or no "color" for the simple reason that
the human eye isn't sensitive enough to turn the spectral information
that is inherently present into what our brains interpret as "color".
But that spectral information is real, and present. So-called "true
color" astroimages simply present an object in a way that approximates
how it would appear if our eyes were more sensitive. When an imager
plays with color saturation (mainly for aesthetic reasons), it is
really just the equivalent of changing the sensitivity of the virtual
eye of the observer.

Nearly everything in the Universe appears to our eyes in shades of
gray (and a telescope doesn't change this, as a telescope can't make
anything brighter than it is to the naked eye). But practically
nothing in the Universe is actually monochromatic. So an astroimage
made in a colorspace that approximates that of human perception (as
with red, green, and blue filters) is giving a more realistic view of
an object than it is possible to get with the eye alone.

Is that why our NASA/Apollo era only recorded our physically dark moon
in Kodak living color as a passive monochromatic kind of soft terrain
of only pastel grays?

http://translate.google.com/#
Brad Guth, Brad_Guth, Brad.Guth, BradGuth, BG / “Guth Usenet”

On 11/12/2011 7:27 AM, EonWorks wrote:
Some years ago I remember reading online that real photos of space
galaxies, nebula, globular clusters, etc, are practically black and
white with very faint colors. In order to make the photos more appealing
to the human eye the colors are heavily intensified. Is this correct?
Thank you.

_SAIEW_ Space art and Illustration
http://www.art.eonworks.com/gallery/...gallery_1.html

The CCD's used in electronic cameras are really monochromatic in
different wavelengths of light. They combine CCD's sensitive to
different wavelengths to get a colorized image. This has the added
advantage that you can get CCD's that are sensitive to ranges of light
that the human eye in nature can't see, such as UV, IR, X-ray, Gamma,
Microwave, and Radio. They just add a false representative color to
these otherwise invisible ranges for our perusal.

If we were to see most of these objects with our own eyes through the
eyepiece of a telescope, our eyes wouldn't be able to resolve enough of
the colors from far-away objects, but more nearby objects like planets
and closer stars would be still colorful.

Yousuf Khan