since y'all seem to like them, another image from the SPLUS survey!
Most of these objects/galaxies have no colloquial/common name, so I've given them my own nicknames. I call this one Spring Festival, as the colors remind me of red fireworks at a Lunar New Year celebration.
“We see beautiful images released by NASA and other space agencies: ghostly nebulas giving tantalizing hints of their inner structures, leftover ruins of long-dead stellar systems, furious supernovae caught in the act of exploding and newborn stars peeking out from their dusty wombs.
Instead of just sitting back, relaxing and enjoying the light show the universe is putting on, some people feel compelled to object: But those colors are fake! You wouldn't see that nebula with your eyes! Binoculars and telescopes wouldn't reveal that supernova structure! Nothing in the universe is that shade of purple!
If one had to do a census, perhaps the most common colors in the universe are red and blue. So if you're looking at a gorgeous Hubble Space Telescope image and see lots of those two colors, it's probably close to what your unaided eye would see.
But a broad wash of green? A sprinkling of bright orange? Astrophysical mechanisms don't usually produce colors like that, so what's the deal?
The deal is, again, science. Researchers will often add artificial colors to pick out some element or feature that they're trying to study. Elements when they're heated will glow in very specific wavelengths of light. Sometimes that light is within human perception but will be washed out by other colors in the picture, and sometimes the light's wavelength is altogether beyond the visible.“
A science book for people who don’t really need science anymore, covering why, even when we have access to all the understanding we could ever wish for about how they work, nebulae are still wicked. Rad terms for awesomeness abound.