Ever wondered how how researches have produced images like the banner-shot on this blog? Contrary to popular belief, they don’t just look through a telescope and gawk at these stunning vistas of color. The raw images that come back from the Hubble, for instance, actually tend to look something like this…

Granted, still pretty impressive considering the distance at which they are captured, but not quite enough to give us a real feeling for what the universe really looks like out there. That picture (of a star forming nebula) would actually appear something like this to the naked eye…

I compiled that picture this afternoon using three different images that were actually taken by the Hubble telescope. You can actually find stock images at this website:  http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/datasets/ if you’re interested in trying it yourself.  The way researchers develop pictures like this is by taking several shots of the same point with several different lenses, all calibrated to pick up slightly different wavelengths. Mine is fairly simple, made up of three images taken with a 502 nm, 656 nm, and 673 nm lens respectively. By themselves, they produce three mono-chromatic slides (red, green and blue), but when layered on top of each other and tweaked a bit, the produce a pretty amazing image of a nebula in the process of star formation.

If you want to try this yourself, there are detailed instructions here:

http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/stepbystep/