One of the most frequent questions I get when I post images of space: "Are those colors real?"
The answer is no. Well, maybe. Kinda?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-the-colors-in-space-real/
🔭 🧪
The answer is no. Well, maybe. Kinda?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-the-colors-in-space-real/
🔭 🧪
Comments
@markmccaughrean.bsky.social introduced me to the term "representative color" and I like it as an alternative to "false color. It implies that the colors have a physical origin and are not fake. It also doesn't make false promises of color accuracy compared to human vision.
I would like to see the term more widely adopted. 🔭
https://rubinobservatory.org/for-educators/glossary/representative-color-image
The job of the sound engineer is to tweek knobs to broadcast your natural voice.
Same with astrophotographs when it comes to colors in space.
How can we know that a "red" is "red", for example? The machine can display a picture, but two different people could be seeing vastly different colors.
We could determine that a "red" is "red" through rules...
What we call "red" is a specific type of color that we as a species can perceive and identified as such, and that we are using as a basis for all "humans".
But in itself, this has its own kind of beauty:we all have our own experiences through (non)vision.
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Essentially, does the picture accurately correspond to captured spatial information?
So I consider the black hole radioastronomy pictures to be real photos too.
With all the caveats that it won't look like that too your eyes.
What's a little informative color shifting on top of the massive data collation and precise optical engineering already needed to see these things?