Neptune isn't as blue as you think, and these new images of the planet prove it
Neptune isn't as blue as you think, and these new images of the planet prove it
A new treatment of images collected by Voyager 2 in the late 1980s using data from the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the actual colors of the solar system's distant ice giants, Neptune and Uranus.
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"Even though the artificially saturated color was known at the time amongst planetary scientists — and the images were released with captions explaining it — that distinction had become lost over time."
Things like this are why I have a bit of a bone to pick with astrophotography. Those breathtaking images of nebula or gas clouds? Manipulated to the point they might as well be fake.
"This is what the nebula would look like if we could see IR and if we made all the different elements like Hydrogen and Nitrogen glow in different neon colors to distinguish them"
Cool, so not actually at all what the nebula looks like. Got it.
But that's what the public sees, and most people think that if you had a powerful enough telescope, you'd see all these amazing colors and details. But that's not really the case at all.
I submit that the value of communicating spectroscopic information far outweighs the marginal negative impact of false coloration. Though, perhaps it should be normative to display nebulae in the visible spectrum side-by-side with the false color images. Problem there is that many nebulae do not give off appreciable visible light.
I heard an interview with an astronomer, who was asked if pictures from Hubble were "real". He began by pointing out that you eye is not 2.4 meters across, so expecting it's photos to be "real" is starting from a flawed premise.