How Do Space Pictures Get So Pretty?

[n2doc]

Photoshop, of course.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009, at 4:56 PM ET

A picture taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope was released on Monday; the image, which depicts the birth of 100,000 stars in a far-away gas cloud, shows a splotchy shape in light red, set against a background of speckled blue-white stars and olive mist. How do these photographs get to be so pretty?

Teams of specialists on the ground gussy them up for public consumption. Here's how it works: Telescopes like the Spitzer and the Hubble take black-and-white pictures using different filters to capture particular wavelengths of light. (The image released this week is a composite created from four shots of the same thing.) Then these pictures are sent back to Earth via the Deep Space Network, a set of large antennae set up around the world.

more:

http://www.slate.com/id/2227828?nav=wp

[tridim]

1. What is Slate implying here?

We've been doing composite imaging for decades, that's just how modern telescopes work.

[POAS]

3. Very common and standard technique

Shoot through three different colored filters to eliminate some wavelengths then recombine into a full color image.

Some images however do not lend themselves to such a technique. Ultraviolet wavelength images for example need to have a "false color" added to help the image make sense in the visible spectrum.

Is this supposed to be controversial now? If it is then somebody is a lazy reporter.

[Posteritatis]

5. Slate's implying (correctly) that a lot of people don't know how modern telescopes work

It's an innocuous enough article; I don't get why people seem to actually be upset by it.

[tridim]

6. It upsets me because I've heard people (even on DU) claim that IR images are "fake"

because they have false color. That's nowhere near true, radiation is there weather we can see it or not.

We just happen to be a species that is unable to see IR and UV wavelengths with the naked eye.

[Posteritatis]

7. I've always thought that lack was grossly unfair on evolution's part. (nt)

[hunter]

8. We didn't even get decent color vision.

Blame our fury brown mammal ancestors. The avian family tree has a nice spread of color receptors. Our ancestors lost some of these, I guess they didn't need them scurrying around in the dark. We great apes got some quick and dirty hack job back when the red-green receptor that was left split into what we call "red" and "green" but are still too close together at 564 & 534 nanometers, while our blue peaks at 420 nanometers. That is not "intelligent design."

The anti-evolutionist always talk about the wonderful human eye, but I've got to wonder why a Creator wouldn't give us the excellent color vision many birds have.

The wonderful thing about modern astronomy is that we don't have to be satisfied with the weird and limited spectral discrimination of our own eyes. We can translate the data we collect into colors our eyes can see.

[Pangolin2]

2. The colors are artificial...and of course a matter of opinion. Just like when infrared photos are

manipulated so their images are visible to humans. :-)

[joshcryer]

4. "Space pictures weren't always so pretty." Bull fucking shit.

Color takes a lot of resolving power (light gathering power). Space is this beautiful, this colorful, this amazing, it's just that using filters can lead to subjective interpretation.

Put your eye on a 25" Obsession and look at M27.

[denbot]

10. The best I can hope for is to some day buy a used Obsession 18.

Someday is far off, but that doesn't stop me from regularly looking through the Astromart classifieds.

[sakabatou]

9. I wonder what we'd see if we went to the actual object.

[BlooInBloo]

11. I thought everyone knew this.