Beauty in the Eye of Hubble

An anonymous submitter cut-and-pasted yet another beautiful Hubble picture, of a planetary nebula around a dying star. Wow.

Great picture, now can we see it in true colors

[dolphin558]

Most of the released Hubble photographs have been given artificial colors. This one is no exception. It is still a beauty. http://www.geocities.com/lilmacumd/escape.html

Re:Great picture, now can we see it in true colors

[ObviousGuy]

Black and white wouldn't be quite as stunning, IMO.

Mmm.. Galactic donut..

black and white?

[dolphin558]

Nebula are black n white? I know they're duller than these pictures but are you sure about black/white?

Re:black and white?

[ObviousGuy]

From what I understand they are as black and white as the stars we normally see. The Stellar Eggs, [stsci.edu] for example are awesome in appearance but if you took away the false coloring you end up looking at a fuzzy muddle of greys. [stsci.edu]

Re:black and white?

[CheshireCatCO]

Oh, no. They really have colors. You get the images from the CCDs in black and white because you have to take one expose through each filter (which is then just a map of intensity at that waveband). But you then add the images to get color.

HST images (as well as other telescopes's outputs) tend to be false colored for two reasons:

1. Because stretching the color tables often brings out subtle details. You can see this is a true and stretched image of Jupiter, for example.

2. Many (most maybe even) HST images include wavelengths that we can't actually see, into the IR and UV. If you want to see those wavelengths, you'll have to false color.

I do sort of wish that they'd always include a little note in the captions stating that the color tables have been stretched or otherwise manipulated. But they seldom do. It's just a dream I have.

Re:black and white?

[mgarraha]

The Fast Facts [stsci.edu] page says what wavelengths are used in this image. H-alpha and N II are both red, so they probably mapped one of those to green.

Re:black and white?

[dolphin558]

So is this photo have the true color configuration?

Re:Great picture, now can we see it in true colors

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking for more info on how Hubble images are colorized? Check this info page [hubblesite.org] out.

Humbling...

[blankmange]

Artificial colors or not - just being able to see such an image is an affirmation of life. Thank god for technology!

knee nebula

[thorgil]

i find the name quite booring...
IC 4406? naHH... don't like it..

I think it looks like a human knee...
.......
maybe grandmas knee..
...

lets call it that:
grandmas knee nebula

Re:knee nebula

[ObviousGuy]

The article said it looked like a retina, so maybe

Detached floating space retina that looks like grandma's knee nebula

That's catchy!

Story titles

[OgdEnigmaX]

Could we please refrain from plagiarizing titles? Admittedly this is not as bad as ripping article summaries, but still doesn't sit right. Very neat picture in any case.

Itsa Fake!

[Tablizer]

It is really a negative of a used condum.