Scientists explain the process of coloring images from the James Webb telescope

James Webb began his process of exploring the universe with a clear example of its potential, providing us with impressive images of stars in high quality detail.

However, a curious fact is that the space telescope itself captures images through an infrared lens and produces grayscale photographs. So how POT show us color pictures?

Photo colorization process by James Webb

Specialized teams POT They are responsible for analyzing the data coming from the telescope. Depending on the elements, they assign them a color.

“Something I’ve been trying to change people’s minds about is to stop obsessing over the idea, ‘Is this what it would look like if I could go into a spaceship and see it in person?’ You don’t ask a biologist if you can somehow shrink down to the size of a cell and look at the coronavirus,” says Joe De Pasquale, one of those responsible, in a Gizmodo article.

Astronomy is often done outside of the visible spectrum because many of the most interesting objects in space glow brightly in ultraviolet, X-ray, and even radio waves. James Webb it is designed to observe infrared light, which has a wavelength longer than that of red visible light, but shorter than that of microwaves.

“These are the tools we have developed to expand our vision, to go beyond what our eyes are capable of, to see light that our eyes are not sensitive to, and to distinguish between objects that we are likely to be able to see with only our eyes, our eyes,” DePasquale said. “I’m trying to bring out more detail, more color richness and complexity inherent in the data without actually changing anything.”

The images have a lot of detail but need to be processed on Earth, mainly to remove glare and distractions such as cosmic rays and reflections from bright stars. The example of the Carina Nebula is clear: the original image is a black rectangle with white dots, but the analyzed image has the colors and all the spectra that the location supports.

And the same photo after treatment:

Color Assignment

The colors were not chosen randomly, the scientist notes, but are symbols for each element.

“I think there are some connotations associated with ‘staining’ or ‘false color’ that imply that there is some process where we arbitrarily choose colors to create a color image,” DePasquale said. “Representative color is the preferred term for the work we do because I think it includes the work we do to convert light to create a true color image, but in a wavelength range that our eyes are not sensitive to. “.

Longer infrared wavelengths are assigned redder colors, and shorter infrared wavelengths are assigned bluer colors. Through chromatic ordering, the spectra are divided into a full range of colors for representation in images.

“It’s a balance between art and science because you want to showcase science and features, and sometimes those two things don’t necessarily work together,” suggests Alyssa Pagan, science imaging designer for the telescope.

When telescope images are collected, image processors work with instrument scientists to decide which features of a given object should be highlighted in the image: perhaps its hot gas or cold dusty tail.

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