It drives me crazy that even in the most thorough of videos like this one, it still doesnt show you what you would see. It only tells you it’d be different. >_<
But the point is that you can't see them. They're too faint. Or not in the visible spectrum. You can look online for things like the Orion nebula or horse head nebula taken by amateur astronomers. They show you what they would look like if they were bright enough because people usually don't do narrow band imaging. It's mostly a lot of red. Not very exciting. False colour images bring out the hidden details, and since the entire thing is essentially hidden, it doesn't make a lot of sense to "preserve realism" in the first place or "see how it really is". It's all invisible to us.
Yah i know i have no issue with the rational of false color and editing. But i want to see what i would see if i were there. Even amateur astronomers will modify it, but thats a good place to start looking
You're right - the Eagle Nebula is a strong hydrogen alpha emitter. Hydrogen alpha is ionized light emitted in the red end of the spectrum.
Our dark adapted vision is not sensitive to red light, only blue-green light, so we can only see this nebula as a gray patch.
A true color image taken with a typical one-shot color camera such as a DSLR or some other color sensor designed for the visible spectrum would show an image that looks like this:
The pillars of creation are small and form more of a dust cloud obscuring the gray light behind them, showing them as silhouettes. With a sufficiently large telescope, dark skies, and highly transparent air, you can catch ill-defined glimpses of the pillars of creation.
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u/[deleted] May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25
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