Have you been watching Battlestar Galactica? If so, you will notice that they show a beautiful and multi-colored space, much like NASA’s Hubble photographs. I took a screengrab, above, to illustrate the point. But is that how space would really look to the human eye, as suggested by BSG? This bugged me to no end, so I did a little research. Explanation and comparative photos after the jump.

To make a color image of an object, the Hubble Space Telescope takes several black and white images, each through a different colored filter, so that only light of certain wavelengths can reach the camera. Often they will filter and photograph the whole spectra of light- radio waves, microwaves, infrared, x-rays, gamma rays, and ultraviolet light (which cannot be seen by the human eye at all) as well as visible light. Keep in mind that visible light that can be seen by the human eye is only one-thousandth of one percent of the light spectrum. They then assign each filtered image a color in photoshop- not necessarily it’s true color or the one it was filtered through, and often including the non-optical bands of light. They then composite all the images and colors to create the final images released to the public. This means that the final released image will often be comprised of different colors and many more colors than the human eye would see in space.

Here is a simple example:

This is a black and white original photograph from the HST.

color has been assigned to the photo seen above, as well as several others, to make this compilation. The yellow-white color of several of the galaxies represents the combined light of many stars. Red identifies cool stars, old stars, and the glow of stars in distant galaxies. It could just as easily be neon green and pink. The human eye would not see this part of space nearly as bright or as colorful as the image shows.

On the left: Uranus in true-color - as it would appear to the human eye. On the right: Uranus in false-color - showing different colors assigned for each filter, not the colors that they actually represent.

This picture, which is very similar to the screengrab I took of BSG’s space, is a montage assembled from four different April 1999 telescope pointings with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which used six different color filters, capturing more than just the visible light spectrum, and is using false-color.

So– next time you watch Battlestar Galactica, or look at NASA’s beautiful space photographs, keep in mind that that is not how space looks to the human eye.