![]() The flat-out gorgeous Hubble spacescapes look too good to be true. As NASA image processor Zolt Levay has written in Sky and Telescope: 4 Indeed, these are cosmic scenes that exist in what Benjamin called “the optical unconscious,” those visual fields to which the naked eye is forever blind, and their authenticity asks to be taken on faith. 3 The process of applying color to what were originally black and white images is the source of some contention among audiences who feel “tricked” upon discovering the photographs are not the same as one would “see” in space. 2 “False color” is the term used to describe the color assigned to the invisible wavelengths picked up by the telescope’s detectors, including radio waves, infrared light, X-rays, and gamma rays. It is amid such binary oppositions that the confusion over “false color” emerges in the interpretation of telescopic images of deep space, the most famous of which are images like the Eagle Nebula produced by the Hubble Telescope. To decorate, we find, is to augment reality through artifice, to overlay inoperable aesthetic considerations atop what we know to be “true” and factual. 1 In this statement, we see a prevailing logic at work: the division between subjectivity and objectivity, form and function, pleasure and utility. “Scientific pictures are not decoration but knowledge,” declared photo historian Vicki Goldberg in the first sentence of a 2001 New York Times article on the use of imagery in scientific practice.
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