this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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The Busy Center of the Lagoon Nebula


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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

it's a false color image

it's too tiny to take a picture of using a traditional telescope, so instead, they use multiple telescopes around the Earth, and piecemeal that data together. Which means they have to reconstruct the missing details (it's not made up, it's more like playing "connect the dots" with tons of math)

the final image is a composite of 3 different grayscale images, taken at different wavelengths of light.

The resulting black and white images are given different colors, then blended together (which is pretty similar to how cameras take images, they just map the grayscale images to colors we can see with our eyes)