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All space images taken by space telescopes like the Hubble or the James Webb are all black and white. But why?
The reason being simple is that the space telescopes use black and white cameras and not the coloured ones.
Black and white cameras produce higher resolution images because they allow lights of all wavelengths to pass through, whereas colourised cameras filter out light and allow lights of only specific wavelengths (like that of red, green and blue RGB) to pass through, creating less sharper images. Therefore, the space telescopes use black and white cameras known as monochrome cameras to produce all detailed image as possible.
We humans are capable of seeing only a fraction of light known as the ‘visible spectrum’ but space telescopes can see beyond that too. However, in order to make things more visually representable to us, we ‘colourize’ the images. Yes, you read it right. We add colour to the images on our own. And the colourisation is done on an RGB scale, the RGB being the building blocks of almost all the visible colours.
The space telescopes take the same image through different filters, then these filtered images are assigned different colours each, later combined together to form the true colour image.
But sometimes, certain images are nothing but just a cloud of gas like this one. Now the question comes that how do we colourize colourless gasses like hydrogen and oxygen?
Well, the gases don’t have a colour of their own, so we assign them one. The colours are assigned to gasses in a chromatic order, i.e. the gas with higher frequency would be given blue, and the one with the lower frequency would be assigned red. RGB colours are then mixed to get the true colour image. After slight alterations we get the final image of the space, the image which expands the horizons of research and curiosity for all of us.
The space might not actually be in the colours that we perceive, but it is beyond what we could even visualize. And the next time you see any space image don’t fail to realize that the image can be true yet not true.
If this blog interested you, then don’t forget to watch our video made on the same. You would find more such interesting videos on our YouTube channel.
Talking about colours, we are excited to announce the launch of Accurate Calculator in dark mode. Accuracy along with a better UI and design now available for our dark mode users. Check it out on GooglePlay.
