Sourced from http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/antennaedata/
Edited on Fitts Liberator and Photoshop

What you see before you is a photoshop rendering of the Antennae Galaxie collision. Photoshop? You may be wondering… Do not worry,though. This is not a photoshoped landing on the moon kind of situation. In fact, all Hubble Telescop images are photoshoped. Now you may be a bit dissapointed at this news. Though if you were wandering through space, you unfortunatley would not be surrounded by the many colors published by NASA. ‘So it’s all a sham!’ you procclaim. Well, not necessarily.

Because our limited optic abilities, we would interperet most of the heavenly bodies out there to be just white light, or red or blue light. So then where do the pretty colors come from?

Each objects that emmits light, emmits different frequencies of light based on its composition. So, stars emmiting mostly visible light are similar to our Sun. Stars emmiting mostly blue light have higher frequency light and are therefore hotter. Contrarily, stars that appear red in color emmit more infared light, at a lower frequency, making thier temperatures relatively cooler. The diagram below demonstrates the relationship between light frequency and color:

Sourced from http://physics.tutorvista.com/waves/wavelength-spectrum.html via Google Images

The illustration demonstrates how the higher the frequency (i.e higher energy), the bluer the light.

So, what does all this have to do with the photoshopping of images we all knew and loved to be “real?”

The point is, just because we cannot see the whole spectrum of light that an object is emitting, does not mean that the object does not emmit that kind of light. If we see it to be blue, it just emitts more blue light than red (or any other color/frequency). So, what is done with the image from Hubble is this:

The spectrum for each object is determined and we can figure out the amount of blue, green, and red light present (primary colors detected by the rods in our eyes). Then, we can seperate the image into the blue light detected, the green light detected, and the red light detected. The images will vary in brightness and location of brightness, depending on which part of the object emmits which frequencies. We can then add the color we are trying to represent on programs such as photoshop, layer the images together, and create beautiful respresentations of the object’s color spectrum.

So, to put your worries at ease: No, the NASA images are not “fake.” They are simply looking at things from a perspective not available to the naked eye.

Want to learn how to make your own images? Just follow this link to the Hubble website: http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/stepbystep/

Now, back to the Antennae Galaxies. When we imagine galaxies colliding, we may imagine massive explosions, huge emmision of light, and atomic bom-esque scenarios. However, the reality is that these ‘collisions’ are far much more tame than our imaginations wish them to be. Although these are the youngest example of merging galaxies we have yet to observe, they have actually been merging for hundreds of millions of years, the Hubble website reports. Learn more about it here:  http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic0615/

So, the moral of the story is simple: everything is more than it appears. It is the same moral we have learned here on Earth but amplified by lightyears. It just goes to show that the cosmos are not some big and scary unknown, but are more a part of us than we know.