Photos from the Webb space telescope are colorized. Here’s how.
- A new Webb telescope image commemorates its first photos released last year
- The human eye can't see all the telescope can detect
- Engineers translated the raw data into something humans could see
The first anniversary image released Wednesday, July 12, 2023, by Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach, shows NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope displaying a star birth like it’s never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pon via AP)
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(NewsNation) — The colorful skyscapes captured by the James Webb Space Telescope didn’t always look exactly as they appeared when NASA released to images to the public last year.
The space agency on Wednesday issued a close-up photo of a star being formed to mark one year since the public first laid eyes on the telescope’s sightings. But the human eye isn’t able to detect all the telescope can capture. In order for the public to appreciate its dispatches from the sky, the images first needed to be manipulated, or translated, into something humans can process, according to multiple reports.
The human eye can see a limited spectrum of colors, but the telescope sees heat radiation and captures another part of the electromagnetic spectrum, Forbes reported. The images released by NASA are real, but the colors in them are more of a translation.
The photos are delivered in black-and-white depictions of those wavelengths of light. Engineers then assigned a visible color to each of the wavelengths of infrared light captured by the telescope and used that information to make the rich, colorful composite images, Forbes explained.
It’s a technique that’s been around since the 19th century and has been used to colorize black-and-white photos, Vox reported.
In the case of the James Webb Space Telescope, engineers filtered those wavelengths through colors interpretable by the human eye, “like playing a song in a different key,” Forbes senior contributor Jamie Carter wrote.
