Am I the only one who thinks false color images are overdone?

I keep seeing everyone post these super saturated nebula photos with wild colors that aren't real. I mean, the Hubble palette is cool and all, but it bugs me when people don't label it clearly. A friend at my local astronomy club in Tucson showed me how to pull raw data from NASA archives, and the actual hydrogen alpha is just a faint red glow. Why not post the true color version alongside the processed one so newcomers know what they're looking at? Has anyone else tried explaining this to a beginner and had them not believe you?

3 comments

3 Comments

wright.leo14d ago

Yeah I read this guy John Dobson rant about false color ruining astrophotography once.

avery_flores14d ago

False color this, false color that - people act like every nebula shot has to be grayscale or it's cheating. I mean, do these same folks complain about HDR in landscape photos or color grading in movies? It's a tool, not a crime. Dobson was a smart guy but his takes on digital processing were from a time when telescopes were basically PVC pipes with mirrors. Let's be real, all astrophotography is false color anyway since our eyes can't see that much detail from light pollution.

ramirez.vera14d ago

All astrophotography is false color anyway" - that's a stretch though. There's a difference between stretching data to bring out what's actually there versus assigning colors that don't exist at all just to make something look cooler. If you're mapping oxygen to blue and hydrogen to red when the camera only saw grayscale, that's more like a painting than a photo, isn't it?