The colors are not there to make the pictures pretty for you. They represent whatever elements the science is focusing on in that specific picture, and serve a very important purpose.
The point of using telescopes is not to give you cool wallpapers, but to understand what's out there. Since our eyes can't tell hydrogen from whatever other element, they accentuate the colors. The colors are not completely made up, the pictures come in red, green and blue, and are then combined and sometimes made more vivid, if there's a reason for them to be.
If they mindlessly colored the images to look pretty, only for the funding, without providing any kind of useful and peer reviewed data which advances our understanding of the universe, they would not get any money from anyone, you confused, angry soul.
Go through these 6 short slides about Hubble, if you want to understand what "fake color" means. JWST is an infrared observatory, but similar shit applies to it.
chadowmantis t1_j23u9j8 wrote
Reply to comment by citoloco in The Webb Telescope Is Just Getting Started by WokeUp2
The colors are not there to make the pictures pretty for you. They represent whatever elements the science is focusing on in that specific picture, and serve a very important purpose.
The point of using telescopes is not to give you cool wallpapers, but to understand what's out there. Since our eyes can't tell hydrogen from whatever other element, they accentuate the colors. The colors are not completely made up, the pictures come in red, green and blue, and are then combined and sometimes made more vivid, if there's a reason for them to be.
If they mindlessly colored the images to look pretty, only for the funding, without providing any kind of useful and peer reviewed data which advances our understanding of the universe, they would not get any money from anyone, you confused, angry soul.
Go through these 6 short slides about Hubble, if you want to understand what "fake color" means. JWST is an infrared observatory, but similar shit applies to it.