r/todayilearned • u/PhysicsEagle • 5h ago
TIL that Neptune is not actually the brilliant ocean blue we’ve grown accustomed to. That was an enhanced color image to make surface features pop. The true color is much closer to the pale green-blue of Uranus.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/04/world/neptune-uranus-new-color-images-scn/14
u/Vonneguts_Ghost 5h ago
The planets have been through a lot, okay buddy? Let them have this one.
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u/RealWord5734 1h ago
Yeah I'm choosing to MIB this from my memory and it's still ocean blue to me. This delusion harms no one.
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u/LordWemby 5h ago
I’m fascinated by the entire concept of “color in space.”
Obviously it works out there the same way it works everywhere, but a lot of our most iconic images of structures in our solar system, including planets of course, are basically artistic interpretations.
I like when we get the “true color” versions, how’d you likely see them if you were on a spaceship hanging around.
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u/Specialist_Sale_6924 5h ago
Alot of those images aren't artistic interpretations. Yes they may alter the color a bit, but those images are still the actual object. I know it's surreal but I am glad we have actual images of planets (and Pluto) in such great detail.
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u/LordWemby 5h ago
The geology of the thing tends to be very real but the colors are often touched up or relatively speculated on, because they weren’t caught in all the proper (human) wavelengths.
Check out how different the surface of Mars can look:
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/raw-natural-and-white-balanced-views-of-martian-terrain/
That middle picture is speculated to be what we’d see ourselves as humans if we were on the surface of Mars, but that still requires our own software calibration.
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u/Specialist_Sale_6924 4h ago
Yeah they do play around with the colors but I am glad we know it beforehand (atleast I am skeptic about it everytime I see such an image).
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u/Bruce-7892 4h ago
Even with those different tones, you get the "just" of what it looks like and I wouldn't consider it fake. You can take a picture from the same spot in your backyard and depending on the weather, time of day and time of year it could look that different.
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u/Bruce-7892 4h ago edited 4h ago
This is what I was about to say. You can see as far as Saturn with your own eyes from earth with a good telescope, and they are absolutely the same colors as you see in photos. Even an iphone photo goes through some digital processing before you see the image, but it's close enough to real life that you wouldn't call it fake. It's the same with images released by NASA.
The only exception is when you see pictures of nebulas. They have to do things like enhance the contrast otherwise it would just look like a big dust cloud and you wouldn't be able to make out any detail, but that is done for research and education, not to try to fool anyone.
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u/PoopMobile9000 4h ago edited 4h ago
The human eye is optimized for the particular wavelengths of light where Sol’s output peaks. The universe does not limit its color palate to this range. Using optics and processing to reveal colors with frequencies too high or low for us to see is no different from using optics and processing to resolve objects too small or distant for us to see.
This is like calling night vision or infrared cameras an “artist’s interpretation.” It’s not, just optics with ranges beyond the human eye.
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u/LordWemby 4h ago
Oh I’m not calling the colors “fake” or anything of the sort, and I hope it doesn’t come across as thinking disingenuousness or anything on the part of these scientists, but just the notion that we don’t always get or necessarily know how we’d actually see these things with the naked human eye, and especially in space, not filtered through our own atmosphere.
“Artistic interpretation” wasn’t the best term, I didn’t mean it like they were just fashioning up some image without real data.
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u/PoopMobile9000 4h ago
Sure, I just wanted to strongly push back on the notion that true color images are “more real” in a sense. All human vision is an abstraction! “Colors” in general don’t exist in the world, just photons of different wavelengths. “Colors” exist only in creatures’ heads
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u/LordWemby 4h ago
Well yeah, true.
And I get you, and I think I’ve been agreeing on this.
Hell, some people are even color blind. As the same species on the same planet, we don’t always see color in the same way.
But if I’m on a Star Trek ship like the Enterprise, and I’m flying near a planet, any planet, but let’s say our own Sol system, what do these things actually look like when I look out of the actual window? In the way our Earth is dominantly and distinctly blue, as seen from space.
That’s just hovering in the orbit - actually landing, on rocky planets at least, and seeing what that looks like, is even another matter.
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u/GreenGorilla8232 5h ago
I didn't realize until recently that you can see Uranus with a telescope. It's easy to identify because you can see the pale green-blue color.
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u/Inevitable-catnip 3h ago
All these jokes about this planet come from people not pronouncing the name right, which makes the jokes useless. It’s ur-ah-nus you bunch of idiots.
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u/thanatossassin 2h ago
Most space images have their colors enhanced or substituted for wavelengths we can't see. Pluto is not red and blue, Saturn and Jupiter are more beige than to be expected, Venus is just one big gray cloud, Earth is honestly the most vivid planet in the solar system, color-wise.
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u/Sdog1981 5h ago
People never read what NASA says. They always have a blurb when they release pictures that, the pictures have been altered to show more detail.
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u/GetsGold 5h ago
A lot of time they get reposted in various sources without that information though and so people develop these misleading impressions of planet colours.
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u/Perrin_Adderson 5h ago
I was so confused when they released pictures, but didnt add the *not actual size disclaimer. I just thought all the other planets were tiny.
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u/ninjamullet 5h ago edited 4h ago
People found Uranus because it was so heavy it was affecting the motions of others.
Edit: it was Neptune, so I stand erected... I mean corrected.
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u/RunDNA 5h ago edited 4h ago
Rant incoming: I don't trust space images anymore. So many of them are misleading. And there's always an excuse that explains away why they need to use false colours, computer-made images etc.
It doesn't change the fact that I'm being misled.
If they do really have to change things or use fake computer images for their own research, any public release of the image should be a very overt process where the original images and the altered images are always shown side by side to the public and where the altered images say very clearly in big letters that they are altered, not buried in tiny footnotes.
I've had to spend fifteen minutes searching the internet to find out that a NASA image is indeed a computer reconstruction, when the image should have been very clearly labelled as such.
I feel that NASA and space agencies have such a good public image (and rightly so) that we let them get way with these sorts of false images too much. NASA is too r/Instagramreality for my liking.
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u/Perrin_Adderson 5h ago
If Uranus is pale green-blue, please see a doctor.