Name: How NASA Colors Images of the Universe
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The James Webb Space Telescope detects infrared light, which our eyes can’t see. Data image developers bring those observations into the visible light spectrum, where they take on the colors of the rainbow.

Data image developers combine science and art to bring color to JWST's images.

How NASA Colors Images of the Universe

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The James Webb Space Telescope detects infrared light, which our eyes can’t see. Data image developers bring those observations into the visible light spectrum, where they take on the colors of the rainbow.

Data image developers combine science and art to bring color to JWST's images.

Space & Flight

How NASA Colors Images of the UniversePublished February 23, 2023AARON EVANS: Every time you get this new image, it’s just like unwrapping a present to, basically, see what there is to see. So, it’s a pretty exciting experience.NARRATOR: But before we get the chance to appreciate these mesmerizing images, they need to be tweaked.AMBER STRAUGHN: The human eye can only see a very narrow part of the spectrum. You know, your blue to red, but there’s light on either of the other sides of that spectrum. And of course, J.W.S.T. is infrared, so it’s on the red side of light.JOSEPH DE PASQUALE (Senior Science Visuals Developer, Space Telescope Science Institute): Right, so Webb is an infrared telescope, so it’s sensitive to light that is beyond what our eyes can see. So, that’s two layers of adjustments.NARRATOR: It’s the job of the data image developer, part science geek, part artist, to take this invisible infrared light and translate it into colors our eyes can see. J.W.S.T. takes multiple images of the same celestial object, with different infrared filters, represented here in black and white.JOSEPH DE PASQUALE: We’ve taken light of different infrared wavelengths and split it up. And so, there’s long wavelength infrared, medium wavelengths, but a little bit shorter and then shorter wavelengths.NARRATOR: Now, those infrared waves are translated into the colors of the rainbow.JOSEPH DE PASQUALE: We try to adhere to a philosophy of colorizing the data that we call “chromatic ordering.”ALYSSA PAGAN (Science Visuals Developer, Space Telescope Science Institute): We’re capturing these wavelengths in infrared light, and we’re shifting them into the visible part of the spectrum. And we are assigning color that represent shorter to longer wavelengths, just like we would see them.NARRATOR: Think of it like a song played on a piano, transposed so we’re hearing it in a different key, but it’s still the same song.JOSEPH DE PASQUALE: So the longest wavelength is going to be red, so I will make that red. The next longest wavelength, I’ll assign that green. And then the shortest wavelength, and that’ll be blue. In this case, we actually have four filters, one of them is a narrowband filter that is really isolating a very specific kind of light. And that one, we color orange. So, after pulling everything together, I see that the initial color composite image, here, and it’s really interesting, there’s a lot of potential here, but I also see that it’s very flat, and it needs some, some compositional work.ALYSSA PAGAN: And then this, where it kind of goes into the subjective and more into the artistic.JOSEPH DE PASQUALE: The stars can look very different; the quality of the nebula can look very different. There isn’t really, like, a hard point, where it becomes, you know, going from science to art. It’s sort of the whole process. The science is always there. We’re always respecting the data. We’re not trying to introduce things that weren’t there in the data to begin with, and we’re not trying to remove things that are there. So, the whole goal of this is to create an aesthetically pleasing image that will capture someone’s attention and hopefully inspire them to want to learn more about this region in space.

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How NASA Colors Images of the Universe

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