In any thread involving astrophotography, but (for some reason) particularly anything from Hubble, there is inevitably a slew of people calling ‘fake’, because it’s not what you would actually see if you were standing there - because NASA include colour-coded information from other parts of the visible spectrum.

You have to remember:

• Our eyes only evolved to be maximally sensitive to the light of a G2V star filtered through a dense gas envelope. The visible spectrum is only a tiny, tiny part of the full range of EM emission, and every part gives you different information. Restricting ourselves to this tiny region of information is pointless and arbitrary, as the Universe doesn’t care enough about our personal biology to make its most beautiful wonders available in the visible spectrum.

• If you were actually standing there, you wouldn’t see much of anything at all. Deep sky objects are really, really faint, and our puny human eyes wouldn’t be able to see more than a faint smudge without being aided by long exposures.

• Moreover, because the objects are so faint, you would be using the rods (rather than the cones) to detect most of the photons coming from them - as such, the objects would look black and white anyway, as your rods are pretty insensitive to colour.

Any image taken is going to be different from what you would see with the naked eye, if only by using long exposures. There is no reason to restrict images to what we could personally see with the naked eye, as our naked eyes weren’t designed to look at astronomical objects. They are very poorly designed to do so. So please, can we stop this “fake, not even real colours, this is just conceptual art not science”-type attitude.

EDIT: Thanks to Kosmo199 for a link to a description of how these images are done. For everyone wanting to see what an image straight off the telescope looks like, here is an example. This is why we have image processing!

From Reddit user selador