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Is this image an original picture which is not photoshoped? I see a huge number of Hubble Telescope images on Google and I'm curious whether they are real images or not. If not, where I can find the real images captured by the Telescope which are not photoshopped?

lemonincider
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  • Can you provide a link to where you found the image? – HDE 226868 Jul 04 '17 at 18:14
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    I just googled "Hubble Telescope images" and it's one of them. – lemonincider Jul 04 '17 at 18:31
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    With reference to the comment above, this image is titled Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014 and can be found on the following official sources: http://hubblesite.org/image/3380/news_release/2014-27 and https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140605.html – Dhruv Saxena Jul 04 '17 at 18:51
  • Thank you for your replies but I think there's some miscommunication here. What I meant by the original images which were not photoshopped was the images originally as observed by the Telescope, as opposed to the ones retouched or reproduced by NASA afterwards for better visibility. Sorry for the confusion. – lemonincider Jul 04 '17 at 18:59
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    Well, all images are post-processed, or reduced as it is called, to some extent. For a start, color images are combined from three different images taken with different filters in three different wavelength bands (e.g. RGB). Also, a deep exposure like the HUDF is combined from a large number of short exposures. – pela Jul 04 '17 at 20:04
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    @lemonincider one way to think of it is that modern telescopes simply don't make "natural color" images (like a camera). You're probably familiar with an infrared camera or indeed just an Xray machine at the doctor's. Those don't make "real" images in any meaningful way - right? There simply is no "real" image of an infrared image. (If you as a human look at an "infrared scene" you simply see - nothing). Similarly modern telescopes, in short, simply don't at all make natural "human light" pictures. You can google Hubble "natural color" images (which the scientists make to look that way!) – Fattie Jul 08 '17 at 18:48

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All images provided from large telescopes are a rendering of the data for viewing pleasure. Usually sensors are sensitive in a wide range of wave length, even outside what humans can perceive and color is added by using filters. Hubble uses infrared filters and the so-called Hubble palette (false color).

So, if you mean, do these pictures show what a human observer will see? No, they don't. They are a visualisation of the data collected.

All things observed at low light conditions are black and white, as humans lose color vision at low light.

Sid
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Grimaldi
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