Skip to main content

How Scientists Colorize Those Beautiful Space Photos Taken By the Hubble Space Telescope

When you picture the giant formations of gasses and space dust that make up a nebula, maybe you see the deliciously garish CGI of Guardians of the Galaxy. The look of the Marvel universe is, of course, inspired by eye-popping images of nebulae taken by the Hubble telescope, images that have appeared routinely for the past three decades in the pages of National Geographic, Discover, and your favorite screen savers.

Whether you’re into sci-fi superhero flicks or not, you’ve surely stared in awe and disbelief at these photographs: ghostly, glowing, resembling the illustrations of outer space by certain pulp sci-fi illustrators twenty years before the Hubble was launched into orbit in 1990. If these images seem too painterly to be real, it's because they are, as the Vox video above explains, to a great degree, products of photographic art and imagination.

The Hubble telescope only takes images in black and white. The images are then colorized by scientists. Their work is not pure fantasy. A process called “broadband filtering” allows them to reasonably estimate a range of colors in the black and white photo. Some imaginative license must be taken “to show us portions of the image that would never have been visible to our eyes in the first place,” notes PetaPixel. “For example: turning certain gasses into visible color in a photograph.”

In an impressive few minutes, the Vox explainer digs deep into the science of optics to explain how and why we see color as combinations of three wavelengths. The science has been “the guiding principle in coloring black and white images” since the turn of the 20th century. We learn above how broadband filtering—the photographic technique bringing us full-color galactic fever dreams—originated in the earliest experiments in color photography.

In fact, the very first color photograph ever taken, by physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1861, used a very early version of the technique Hubble scientists now use to colorize images of space, combining three black and white photos of the same object, taken through three different-colored filters. Given the advances in imaging technology over the past 100+ years, why doesn’t the powerful space telescope just take color pictures?

It would compromise the Hubble’s primary purpose, to measure the intensity of light reflecting off objects in space, a measurement best taken in black and white. But the scientific instrument can still be used as cosmic paintbrush, creating jaw-dropping images that themselves serve a scientific purpose. If you were disappointed to learn that the photography fueling our our space imagination has been doctored, watch this video and see if a sense of wonder isn't restored.

Related Content:

The Beauty of Space Photography

NASA Releases a Massive Online Archive: 140,000 Photos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Download

NASA Digitizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the Historic Apollo 11 Mission: Stream Them Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

How Scientists Colorize Those Beautiful Space Photos Taken By the Hubble Space Telescope is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/33dediS
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_108_10-7-21.mp3 As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges , educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason , and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more. Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan. Some articles that fed our discussion included: “ The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism ” by Luke Winkie “ Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular ” by Darron Cu...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more