Reality Check: The Webb Telescope Images are False Colors

The Universe looks nothing like the photos we’re being shown

Not to piss on anybody’s parade, but the new Webb telescope and its amazing images are COLORIZED.

In other words, you’re not seeing these amazing cosmological objects as they would appear out of a space ship’s window.

The main reason the new space telescope has such astonishing resolution is because it senses the infra-red.

That should be our first clue, especially when front page news articles announce the “full-color images.”

Even the reddish hues are artificially colorized, because those long wavelenghts are invisible to our eyes, too.

None of this is to say that what you are seeing isn’t “real” — I’m merely pointing out that the colors are interpreted.

That said, the colors you see in these altered photos do accurately reflect gradations in the light coming from these objects.

And as such, the colorized photos certainly reveal physical structures and details otherwise hidden to us.

The swirling clouds of dust are there, the gorgeous galactic spirals, the gravitational lensing, the jaw-dropping scale.