“From the Earth to the Universe” is a collection of beautiful astronomical images.
Twelve good ones are highlighted at Seed magazine.
Or you can see many more from the collection itself.
8 Responses to Pretty Astronomy
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Thought you gave up on Seed.
I haven’t renewed, but I still get it until it runs out. But this was the online version, which I haven’t forsaken.
I didn’t see where it said anywhere, but iirc from my astronomy days, astronomical images of such color are “false color”. They’re tarted up artificially to be prettier. The real thing is never that dramatic, so they use various methods to make photos that are much more colorful than what you’d see through any telescope.
I think that’s right, Bruce.
But I also think that, at least sometimes, the different colors represent something else, rather than being solely to make it pretty.
Yes, sometimes they represent something other than color. Other times, they’re just enhanced, so something that would appear only very slightly blue to a person looking in a telescope is shown a vibrant blue. One method involved using B&W film with three shots, each using a different colored filter (RGB?), then combining the three negatives into one print. I never really got into the photography part of astronomy, so even if my memory weren’t holy I couldn’t provide much more detail. The universe is incredibly beautiful, but we aren’t evolved to see it without artifice. Recognizing ripe fruit from unripe, and noticing that big thing hiding in the tall grass is enough.
I do wish we could have some other senses. UV vision would be cool. Or detection of changes to an electromagnetic field.
It’s true that what we have has been enough to get us where we are. But it’s also true that more would be nifty.
ISTR someone (Penny?) in ROM who claimed to be among those who have an extra kind of cone that’s sensitive into UV. I don’t know if it was something real, or just a delusion.
She also claimed to have turned down the MacAurthur grant because she doesn’t consider herself a genius (“four sigma plus IQ non-withstanding”).