Disappointment

8/19/07 – 8/26/07
by C. Zaitz

Sometimes when a person takes their first look through a telescope, they get a feeling of, “is that all there is? Where are the colors? Why is it so small and faint?” Ah, you were expecting Hubble Space Telescope photographic quality. How disappointing! Hubble Space Telescope photos are works of art, created from information traveling by radio frequencies over hundreds, thousands, and in the case of the Hubble Deep Field image, billions of light years.

The images are breathtaking. Who can forget the famous “Pillars of Creation,” the image of the Eagle Nebula whose elongated fingers of gas and dust may harbor baby star systems. Or the Deep Field, an image made by opening the Hubble’s photographic eyeball and having it stare at a tiny area of space for a very, very long time. But how do these images get back to earth? Actually, they come to us in black and white, as a series of zeroes and ones, strung along in complicated patterns like strands of DNA. Once they get to earth, computers assemble the information into black and white images. So how did they get so colorful?

Astronomers, or should I say artists, add it later. They use a computer program like Photoshop to color in the gases and clouds with tints they assign. But color is a hard thing to define. We each perceive it differently. Some people have a very keen sense of color, and some are color blind, meaning that the colors they see are different from what most of us see. My dad often confuses red and green, because, he says, red is a very dull color. Most of us don’t see it that way. In the the Pillars of Creation, both hydrogen and sulfur were detected as a red color in the clouds of gas. Astronomers changed the hydrogen to green so it could be distinguished from the sulfur. What we got was a gorgeous, colorful, if not accurate image that filled our imaginations. But what does accurate mean when it comes to color? It’s difficult to define an exact color because it is mostly perception. So how far from red can we stray before it becomes green? Or does it really matter? Dad thought they were still the same color!

How often have I said, “here’s Betelgeuse, a red star,” or, “this is Rigel, a blue star.” No wonder people get disappointed when they are expecting the star to be the color of Bozo’s nose in the sky. I could say, “Betelgeuse radiates light mostly in the infrared and red end of the spectrum, so it’s considered a “red star,” but it is so far away that the very little bit of light we get from it is only slightly tinged orangey-red.” But that’s pretty long-winded! So we oversimplify.

The Hubble pictures are so inspiring that I don’t think the colors are an issue. The only problem comes when people expect to see those kinds of images through a telescope. If you are expecting your view through a friend’s telescope to look like the poster you saw in the mall, you’ll be disappointed. But if you have patience and look with eyes and mind ready to see detail and to absorb what you are looking at, you’re bound to avoid disappointment.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.