...of the Carina Nebula looks like it could be comprised of a who's who of Greek gods and goddesses; particularly Poseidon, front and center. I can see a minimum of 8 or 9 faces in that image. Most include the upper torso. That could be Queen Hera just to the left of Poseidon and Aphrodite just back and to the right of Poseidon with Zeus behind Aphrodite. Perseus or Achilles on the far left in profile with the helmet. There are several more possibilities. I'm pretty sure Hades is in there somewhere...

I see faces in everything.

TYY

Thanks for the link. Fits perfectly.

TYY

But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Other than being a sex starved old man?

I can't wait until they get the new one up there (I have forgotten what it is called)

I wonder what newer technology will do for the pics

...and your ordinary film or video camera.

The Hubble itself is capable of "seeing" colors we cannot see.

The pictures NASA publishes are not colorized in the way an old black-and-white might be colorized, with an artist choosing arbitrary colors, in effect guessing most of the time what the original colors might have been when the movie is filmed. Instead the NASA artist (and yes, it is art) is arranging the actual color information returned by the telescope in a way that makes sense to the pathetically poor color vision of the human eye in a way that is scientifically interesting and/or aesthetically pleasing.

Sometimes the goal of the NASA artist is to recreate what a human eye might see if gazing upon the object directly, but many of these objects are so faint and so far away that no human is ever going to "see" them as Hubble does.

Technically digital cameras only take black and white pictures also, the Bayer matrix in front of the sensor filters out the red, green and blue portions of the spectrum and you have pixels that represent the three primary colors which are then combined in the camera with an algorithm to produce a color image.



Basically the Hubble acts very much like a 3 CCD video camera, except the exposures are one at at time rather than simultaneously..

Feeling adventurous I removed both the IR filter (easy) and the Bayer matrix (difficult).

It now "sees" everything from the near infrared to the near ultraviolet.

I'm not wealthy enough to play with more serious sensors, or acquire any serious color filters.

A better term would be grey scale, where there are numerous levels of grey "colors" between black and white. If these images were actually only black and white then there would be only 2 colors, black and white. With these Hubble images matched with peak wavelength data for various elements "false" colors in the visible, UV and infrared are "assigned" a specific grey scale color to produce these beautiful images.

Each little pixel on the Hubble has it's own properties, as do the methods of scanning each pixel. Extracting the most revealing signals from the noise is not a trivial process; exposures, filters, and analysis are all adjusted to hopefully answer the "question" the astronomer is asking. The telescope is a "camera" with more settings than any professional photographer of earthly landscapes or fashion models ever has to deal with.

Back when astronomy was a chemical photographic process it can be claimed it was "black and white." Each little grain of silver halide was either activated by photons or not. The picture truly was black or white at the microscopic level.

Photomicrograph of grain of
different photographic plates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_grain

Such a rich concentration of star clusters and gas clouds, and somewhere in the middle of it all, an almost unfathomably massive black hole - I'd love to know what the warped space and matter surrounding such an object would "look" like, even if the image may not make sense to the human eye.

electromagnetic radiation we perceive these objects as black and white but they are emitting radiation in a vast range of wavelengths we aren't equipped to see.