Colour or Wavelength - Art or Science

The general public are familiar to some extent with the amazing images produced by the Hubble and James Webb Space telescopes. Such images are presented as “pretty pictures” in more general publications and any more detailed analysis of the images quickly becomes very scientific.

This book proposes to go beyond the pretty picture and explore these wonders of the universe in plain English, using non-scientific language, while maintaining a balance of Science and Art. Aspects of each object such as colour are addressed via a discussion of wavelengths of light, the gases that emit specific wavelengths of light and how these are combined to create the image we see.

The book highlights 50 of the most popular images from these telescopes along with images from terrestrial telescopes in Chile, Spain, The Canary Islands and Australia.

Each image is described in plain English and discusses aspects such as where in the sky is the object, how far is it away, what causes the colours, what processes have formed the structure and what new knowledge has been gained from this observation.

A section outlining how these colour images are produced by combining several monochrome images sheds some of the mystery behind the creation of these images.

The final section includes guidelines on how to access the raw image data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope archives and how citizen scientist readers can create their own images based on their interpretation of science and art.