I mean seriously, all we have are only pictures. Beautiful pictures indeed, of nebulas, the sun, jupiter, saturn, neptune, the milky fucking way, we have pictures of them. Pretty insane that we can actually see real pictures of these phenomena. I am truly grateful of living in a time and place to be able to see this. But why aren't there any hd videos of these things? Videos are simply consecutive pictures taken over a series of time. Why didn't they do this with nebula's and saturn? And Mars, the rover only has taken pictures of Mars, and all the video we have is a crappy 240p landing video. Is it too much data to transfer ? We do have videos taken from satellites of earth from space, but why not of anything else?
Well, two reasons that I can think of. First of all as far away as most of it is we'd see no movement in a reasonable time span anyway so the difference between a picture and a video of something which isn't changing perspective would be small to non-existent. Second being that images such as the Hubble Deep Field isn't a single picture but a huge series of them put together into one, a single picture wouldn't absorb enough light but with lots of them you get a pixel here, another there, and between them we've got a real picture. For a video to be taken of the same place you'd have to have as many cameras as you wanted video frames and that's a lot of damned Hubbles floating around up there On edit I'm sure I'm wrong about the number of cameras we'd need, it wouldn't be a simple matter though. With Mars and such it might come down to expense, weight and timing. Missions are generally planned a decade or two before they ever leave the ground so often lift off with last decades technology, or the one before. And every ounce of extra weight in one instrument means that another has to be reduced or left behind. It's all a trade off.
Lol, those pretty colors arent natural, they're from a combination of different light filters. IRL, it's just a bunch of blue and red stars, with some dark clouds of starstuff. Im sure it's still spectacular, though! Could you imagine being able to safely view a star up close in person?
cause the power that be want you grounded on earth not have you're head(mind) above the clouds...cant get rite down here how you gonna get rite up there...
Alright, makes sense This video blew my fucking mind though, would love to see more like this..Although it sounds very cliché, it's footage like that that really put's things into perspective. Life, the human being, temporary manifestations of energy in a spacetime continuum, entangled in our own lives with our friends and family and parties and jobs and happiness and sorrow, while floating on a rock - suspended in a beam of light - orbiting around a gigantic glowing behemoth, neighboring billions of other stars and galaxies, which we see as tiny dots on our night sky. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFT7ATLQQx8
No, the pretty colors are naturally there. Astronomers use the colors to differentiate the elements in stars, nebulas, and planets. Without these colors they'd have no clue about the elements in celestial objects. I'll also add that I can see the colors with my telescope.
The colors being real or not kinda depends on the type of picture and what it's a picture of. With visible light images it's often natural but even then sometimes accentuated due to low light levels or whatever, with x-ray and other spectrum we've got to adjust or add color or otherwise we won't see anything. In the case of nebula and others of the sort various colors are added to represent various elements, and so on. It really depends on the picture and the source. At the Hubble Heritage Image Gallery for example you can see some of the more famous small scale and full scale images along with image detauils. For example a particular image which showed gravitational lensing so made a bit of news over time is SDSS J1531+3414, on the picture details page at http://heritage.stsci.edu/2014/26/fast_facts.html it explains both what color filters are used and how they are used. That info is out there for most pictures, just have to go to the source and look them up. Anyone who likes this stuff, images and basic space related info, might like the following YouTube page. Link is to Space Rip which has lot of shorts and a handful of full length videos on the subject, mostly intended for amateurs and hobbyists. If anyone likes that stuff there's lots more of the type out there, both more technical and more of the same. http://www.youtube.com/user/SpaceRip
Technically all images are colored in.. when they gather the light, its all pretty much in black and white. They then read the wavelength and add the corresponding color to it. So if they get a wavelength for green, they add green.. which would also mean that you would see green 'in person'. If you see these images, sometimes you can find if it says if its a natural colored photo or false colored. False coloring is different than adding color for the visible light. False coloring is when they add color to the non visible, like UV radiation, infrared, x-ray and gamma. Nebulae have color to them the same way a blue sky has color, visible light that activates our cones cells in the absence of a colored object. There are a good many naturally colored nebulae pictures out there, and they're just as amazing as false colored images. False colored images do pop though..
Spot on. I should've been more specific with my reply to smokehound. I was trying to explain that nebulas have color. The scientists don't just fill in the colors like a coloring book. If you were in a spaceship flying by you'd see all the colors that one would see with a visible light telescope. Specifically towards smokehound. Nebulas aren't black blobs of gas. They would be if there wasn't a star illuminating them. Just like everything else is when light is absent.
Not quite spot on, but probably as close as mine was to it I'd think At least given the cluttered post I made, posted shortly after waking and could have been more clear if I'd waited another half hour or so. But the "Technically all images are colored in.." line suggests the same mistake that I mistakenly left the impression of with the nebula. As someone mentioned above you can see (and photograph) true color images from right here on earth and we've been doing that for ages, and from space. But where light is lower or different instruments/wavelengths are used it gets to be more iffy. We can say always about given platforms or wavelengths, whatever, but not in general. With the nebula I didn't mean to suggest that they don't HAVE color, but that the pictures don't always use it or even have a use for it. We tend to look at them just as pretty pictures but they are requested by scientists with specific science related goals and those goals define the processing within the ability of the platform. One common goal for nebula is to research everything from what comes out of a nova to what goes into stellar formation, hence the fact that they do include (but not every time in every case) a representation of visible elements. I tried to be clear in that, but seem to have fallen short But the lines "It really depends on the picture and the source" and "That info is out there for most pictures, just have to go to the source and look them up" should have made it clear enough I would have thought.
There's no mistake there.. at least all images from Hubble are colored in, rendered. There are different filters for different light. A blue filter will only let blue light in, a green filter will let green light in, and same with red. They then take the information gathered from the filters and add colors accordingly. They add blue for the blue wavelengths just like your eye would add blue for the blue wavelengths. You could argue that the color isn't accurately represented, but you can make that argument for color in general. Looking at a blue ball, you're limited with the number of blue cone cells.. so you won't be taking in anywhere near the full amount of blue light there really is. http://www.space.com/8059-truth-photos-hubble-space-telescope-sees.html does a good job of explaining how they piece the image together. It'd be the same thing if you took a black and white photo of something while recording the information of the wavelengths, and then adding color to the photo accordingly. But often they add more color, like you said for testing and to differentiate between gases.. but all too often I see people take that fact and apply it to all, when that's not the case. It's a lil pet peeve of mine cause it creates this mindset that the universe is black and bland.. when there really is a good bit of color to it. These are naturally colored photos.. http://www.rc-astro.com/nebulae_natural.php Compared to false colored photos.. http://www.rc-astro.com/nebulae_mapped.php I wish they looked like the false colored images, but the naturally colored ones are just as amazing.
That I'm aware of, the grey scale conversion for Hubble was already mentioned in the link I posted for a hubble image last night, but as I said in the above post... "We can say always about given platforms or wavelengths, whatever, but not in general." For the Hubble and others like it which look light years away, in low light level environments or in non-visible light spectrum there will be adjustments be they false colors or true colors which are accentuated for low light. But remember this thread also asked about pictures of mars, the sun, and others of the sort and they don't require anything of the sort. Not Hubble, not the same spectrum, not anything more complex than the camera you probably own. You're making an example of taking a black and white photo and converting it to color which isn't being argued. The only point I'm arguing is that some don't require any such conversion or platforms and given that the topic of the thread includes those, we probably should as well. I understand the idea of pet peeves and don't disagree with you there, I have a couple of my own which tend to include a real aversion to absolutes rather than conditional statements, not just with space in particular but with almost everything. If something applies in a million situations we can bet that someone will find that million and one where it doesn't apply.
I'd like to add something relevent that also suppers this post If I close one eye and look at an.object. that object looks different than if I look with the other eye. Idk if it will.work.for.you. but my eyes clearly send a different.message to my brain even though in looking at Tue same.object Try it out sometime. Your eyes might be slightly different just like your hands are not identical Also. If a bee a humans and a dog all look at the same blue flower, it will look different to each one Dogs cannot see blue. Humans cannot see ultra violet. Bees can see everything humans see plus an additional color. Ultra violet -yuri
If we're into the way we see color or the way our brains work with it rather than what's physically on the photo that's actually a really cool issue. I'm surprised I remembered enough detail to find it but there's a pretty cool TED Talk on the subject from back in 2009, it's about optical illusions and how we see things. http://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see?language=en