![]() 2 “False color” is the term used to describe the color assigned to the invisible wavelengths picked up by the telescope’s detectors, including radio waves, infrared light, X-rays, and gamma rays. It is amid such binary oppositions that the confusion over “false color” emerges in the interpretation of telescopic images of deep space, the most famous of which are images like the Eagle Nebula produced by the Hubble Telescope. To decorate, we find, is to augment reality through artifice, to overlay inoperable aesthetic considerations atop what we know to be “true” and factual. 1 In this statement, we see a prevailing logic at work: the division between subjectivity and objectivity, form and function, pleasure and utility. “Scientific pictures are not decoration but knowledge,” declared photo historian Vicki Goldberg in the first sentence of a 2001 New York Times article on the use of imagery in scientific practice. ![]()
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