What Does Space Really Look Like?

When you see the beautiful pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, you're looking at a lie. They're specially colored images, done for science. But what does space really look like?

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Team:
Fraser Cain - @fcain
Jason Harmer - @jasoncharmer
Susie Murph - @susiemmurph
Brian Koberlein - @briankoberlein
Kevin Gill - @kevinmgill

Created by:
Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer

Edited by:
Chad Weber

Music:
Left Spine Down - “X-Ray”

Do you love the beautiful pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope? Do you ever wonder what it would look like to fly through space and see places like the Orion Nebula up close? Just imagine hiding the Enterprise in the Mutara Nebula, and getting the jump on Khan? Have you ever wondered… what does this stuff actually look like? Looks like we’re back to wrecking sci-fi Christmas again, as I've got some bad news. Nothing, nothing will ever look as cool as the pictures you see on your computer, or even have the same colors. If you were flying right through the Orion Nebula, it wouldn't look anything like the pictures. In fact, it would kinda suck. When looking out into the night sky with your own eyeballs, you don’t see any beautiful nebulousness. Just the stars and the faint glow of the Milky Way. You might be able to see a few fuzzy bits, hint of nebulae, galaxies and star clusters. We’re back to a familiar problem, which those of you who are considering Venus as a vacation spot know too well.We’re made out of meat, and in this case, it’s certainly not doing us any favors. Imagine building a camera out of meat. Pop into a deli, grab a fistful of cold cuts, a pickled egg, and a light sensor, and make that into a camera. Well, that’s your eyes. With the modern advances in camera technologies, we've learned that apparently meat cameras are not great cameras.
The biggest advantage to the inorganic kind is that they can gather light for minutes and even hours, soaking up all the photons streaming from a distant object. They, do however, make terrible sandwiches. For example, the famous Hubble Deep Field photograph, which peered into a seemingly empty part of space, turned up thousands of galaxies. Hubble stared for more than 130 hours to create this image. Our meat cameras refresh themselves every few seconds. Even in the darkest skies, with the most perfectly light-adjusted eyes, if you keep your eyes perfectly still and stare at a spot in space, you can’t gather more than 15-20 seconds of light with your eyes. So we’ll never see these objects because they’re so faint and deliver such a tiny amount of light for every second you stare at them. But sure, what if you got close? What if I stuck my meat camera on a tripod right outside one of these gaseous structures. Here’s the crazy part. Nebulae never get any brighter even as you get closer. In optics, there’s a rule called “the conservation of surface brightness”. As you get closer to a nebula, it also gets bigger in the sky. The increased brightness is spread out over a larger area, and the average brightness remains exactly the same. You could be right beside the Orion Nebula, and it wouldn't look any brighter or majestic than we see it from here on Earth. In other words… it would still suck. But what about the colors? Here’s where astronomers are lying to you in a grand conspiracy of Roswellian proportions. So, watch out for those black helicopters, it’s time for another meeting of the Guide To Space Tinfoil Hat Society. Astronomers generally use black-and-white CCD cameras to make their observations. Then they’ll put filters in front of their cameras to only let through very specific wavelengths of light. Those filters can match the specific colors that make up the visible spectrum: red, blue and green. But usually they’re using filters that reveal scientific information. For example, astronomers want to detect the presence of hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur in a nebula. They’ll use one filter that reveals each one of the elements. And then in a program like Photoshop, they’ll assign red to hydrogen, blue to oxygen and green to sulfur. The resulting image can look beautiful, but the colors have nothing to do with reality. More .....

[eschelar]

It's like driving or flying through a cloud. looks pretty from the ground. Pretty dull from inside.

[TiagoSeiler]

Video is called "What Does Space Really Look Like?".
Not a single image of what space really looks like...

[efbldf]

Just to be fair, I've photographed dozens of Messier Objects and they are quite colorful. No Photoshop necessary. They aren't as crisp as the magazine Photoshop imagines, but they do show vivid color with an 8" sct at + 1 minute.

[shutincharlie]

Photo shopping the universe and passing it off as actual (even by omission) is a disservice.

[ethan]

Never thought I'd hear someone say meat camera

[StereoDProductions]

If you stare long enough with an 8in scope you'll actually see red and green hues in Orion. I think you might be wrong about that one... if the brightness remains steady it must be a pretty nice thing to see up close. Also keep in mind nebula light needs to go through tons and tons of dust before getting here, slightly challenging that "constant brightness".

[Micelli]

This makes sense. I couldn't imagine gases being any more visible in space than they are here on Earth under normal circumstances. And the more visible ones would probably be too dangerous to get close enough for the naked eye to see

[IRONMANAustralia]

Yes, but the good news is: If we did invent an interstellar spaceship we'd install a "windshield" that wasn't just a piece of glass, but a screen that converted boring 'real space' into useful information too - as well as correcting all that predictable distortion and wavelength-shifting at relativistic speeds.

So space would in fact look like it does in Star Trek even though you still know the cake is a lie.  Nothing to worry about.

[veggiet]

What would I still want to see up close?? EVERYTHING. I honestly don't care if what we see pretty from this point of view would look pretty crummy from another point of view, there may be other things that we've never seen before that may actually look pretty with the naked eye, or perhaps even a nebula that we could be in, but we couldn't see it until we get away from our own planet... and even though the enterprise may not see the cloudiness of a nebula in close proximity, their windows and view screens might perform the same sort of wavelength filtering that our current astronomers use, so even if you were close enough get in the nebula you might be able to be just far enough away from the nebula so that it's structure might fill your view, like looking at our slice of the milky way, apply a realtime spectroscopy filter over your field of vision and then *boom* amazing!

[sergio_botero]

The nebulae raw pictures still look pretty amazing.

[josron]

I'm surprised this doesn't have more views. Unfortunately this pretty much confirmed what I was thinking.

[sritger]

I'll take this a step further.  Colors themselves don't actually exist in nature.  All the rich variety of colors that we see every day are merely values assigned by our brains to particular frequencies of visible light.  The world as is actually appears is pretty much like a black and white photograph.  Our brains integrate the information received by the retina at various frequencies and constructs a color image in our minds.

[mikeisi]

So would it be fair to say that the beauty does EXIST...but our eyes simply can't see it?  If so, for me, that doesn't make it so bad.

[ArcaneWorkshop]

Hmmm, my wishful thought, is that augmented reality visors built into our future space helmets, and ship windows will filter the nebula outside just the same way, for visual data of what the gas consists of simply by looking at it, or for no other reason, because it's beautiful!

[PacRimJim]

What does space really look like?
It depends on the sensory organs of the species viewing space, and the length of time they view it, if "view" is the correct term.

[Athanord]

I'd like to see Pluto up close and that wish will probably fulfilled in 10 days from now!

[nickm]

All my dreams, shattered in an instant :'(

[littlekittens]

I'd love to see the surface of of mars in person with my own eyes.I was thinking of signing up for the mars one mission, but I can't just leave my family like that.

[filipprochazka]

Well, from what I read, there are really monstrous nebulae that DO shine enough to be spectacular when viewed with naked eye. For example, had Tarantula nebula been where Orion nebula is now, it would cast shadows (or so I read).
THAT being said, if the nebula is THAT bright in visible spectrum, imagine how bright it is in spectrums we like a lot less.
Yup.
That would probably make for some sizzly viewing.
So... Up close? -scratches beard- I wouldn't mind a direct view at the eye of the Giant Red Spot. Provided that Jupiiter's radiation belts do not reach that far down.

[colinp]

Fraser you have spurned a couple of questions here:
Meat camera? What about vegetarians or those from the planet Vega?
My desktop is the Futurama crew, are you saying that Futurama is a lie?