Thread: The most important pictures

Originally Posted by gismo

That is such an enchanting image, images of space are amongst the most beautiful images I think humans have ever taken.

um let's not forget that most beautiful pictures of space are artificially colored images that look at wavelengths outside the visible range.

if you saw a visible light picture of this, it would hardly look like anything, maybe some very faint shadows of dust clouds.

Originally Posted by Syme

Um, that's only true for pictures taken by telescopes that detect only non-visible wavelengths. Many space images are taken by telescopes, such as the Hubble space telescope, that detect visible light. The "Pillars of Creation" pic was taken by the Hubble telescope in it's visible light mode (it can also detect UV light, but the UV mode wasn't used to take the Pillars of Creation pic). So if you could look at that part of the Eagle Nebula with your naked eye, you would see basically the same thing that's shown in the picture. The same is true of many other Hubble images (which is probably the largest single source of beautiful space pictures). And while it is true that the pic is artificially colored, NASA colorizes them in a way that is pretty close to what the naked eye would see. That's why the gas columns have that reddish-orange color, for instance; they are made mostly of hydrogen, and the hydrogen emission line is in the red part of the visible light spectrum.

Here is a website explaining how the Pillars of Creation imagery was processed. As you can see, the gathered imagery was all taken using filters for various parts of the visible light spectrum. No imaging on non-visible wavelengths was used to create that image.

Touche. Well, aside from the fact that there isn't a nearby light source strong enough to send a lot of light scattered from the nebula to us, I accept that I was wrong.