Anyone on here expert enough (or able to ask any sufficiently expert friend) to answer this general query?
So, those amazing images that Hubble has produced of all kinds of stunning phenomena in deep space - the kind of things you see if you do a Google Images search for "Hubble images of space".
They're so exotic, with a hugely diverse colour palette and wacky stuff like clouds and so on, that they bear no resemblance whatever to stuff we can see ourselves through telescopes.
I understand that the technology which generates the images involves collecting light from very long "exposure", if that's the right term here, as well as all sorts of cleverness to get the magnification of things that are so far away that it's beyond imagination, in remote galaxies. But what I want to know is: do the things in the images actually look like the images? In other words, if a hypothetical human observer were sufficiently close to the things in question, galaxies or whatever, would that observer be able to look into the void and see things that shape and colour with his or her human eyes? Or are the images just some kind of "notional" representations, translations of data about light waves into some easily digestible image which could never actually be seen like that?
So, those amazing images that Hubble has produced of all kinds of stunning phenomena in deep space - the kind of things you see if you do a Google Images search for "Hubble images of space".
They're so exotic, with a hugely diverse colour palette and wacky stuff like clouds and so on, that they bear no resemblance whatever to stuff we can see ourselves through telescopes.
I understand that the technology which generates the images involves collecting light from very long "exposure", if that's the right term here, as well as all sorts of cleverness to get the magnification of things that are so far away that it's beyond imagination, in remote galaxies. But what I want to know is: do the things in the images actually look like the images? In other words, if a hypothetical human observer were sufficiently close to the things in question, galaxies or whatever, would that observer be able to look into the void and see things that shape and colour with his or her human eyes? Or are the images just some kind of "notional" representations, translations of data about light waves into some easily digestible image which could never actually be seen like that?
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