Is NASA's Hubble Space Telescope as Simple as a Phone Camera? Learn More Here

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 Every time NASA posts a picture of space on Twitter or Instagram and explains what it is about, many people in the comments section wonder how these photos were taken, if the colors are genuine, and, most importantly, what cameras the Hubble Telescope is equipped with. In its most recent Instagram post, the space agency stated that it receives this question frequently and so decided to break it down for space aficionados. To begin with, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope does not take a photo and then colourize it, like a smartphone camera does.



According to NASA, Hubble's camera captures images in a wide range of wavelengths that are sent to Earth in grayscale. Scientists then create colour pictures by capturing exposures with multiple colour filters on the telescope, giving a colour to each filter matching to the wavelength, and merging the photos.

According to the space agency, many of the full-color images released by Hubble are the result of merging three distinct exposures — one each in red, green, and blue light.


“When these three colours are combined, they can reproduce nearly any colour of light visible to human eyes,” NASA wrote in the article. “That's how televisions, computer displays, and video cameras generate colours to display images!”


According to NASA, scientists portray such information using the closest approximation of the Ultraviolet and Infrared spectrums in the visible light spectrum. This is done, according to the organisation, since we can't perceive the colours in the ultraviolet and infrared spectrums. The colour of Hubble pictures is believed to be utilised to emphasise intriguing aspects of the astronomical object being investigated. The agency then illustrated its point with an example.


NASA shared a photo of The Ring Nebula, explaining that the deep blue colour in the centre symbolises helium, the inner ring, depicted in cyan, is the glow of hydrogen and oxygen, and the reddish outer ring comes from nitrogen and sulphur. That is how images captured by NASA's Hubble Telescope are generated.


Meanwhile, the space agency on Monday tweeted two photos of the space station with the caption, "Hubble's back!"

One of the images depicts a three-armed spiral galaxy. “After the Hubble crew successfully turned on backup hardware aboard the telescope, the observatory got back to work over the weekend and collected these galaxy snapshots,” NASA said in the caption.

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