Night Sky

Quote: Bullseye "Someone told me all the Hubble pictures are in black and white and the colour is added later by NASA using their interpretations of what is being viewed. Is that right?'"

Yes and no. Hubble doesn't have a "colour camera", all images are taken in grayscale.

Many images are published showing either false, or partly false colours (compared to what you might see with your own peepers if you could) but never without explaining what has been done, and usually to illustrate specific things.

However, Hubble can and does produce amazing "natural colour" images. The basic way to do this is to take images through red, green and blue filters. Then combine the results. So the shot through the red filter only lets through the red part of the visible light spectrum; so you know that that image is actually just the shades of red; same for green, same for blue. Combine them and hey presto, full colour!
hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_th ... /index.php

As for "interpretation", it's all a question of degree. For example, a picture of the Crab nebula may look lovely and colourful, and the light and colours recorded are genuine and "real". Yet you would never experience it like that, as the image is compressed light that actually may have taken a powerful telescope hours to gather. If you were in space looking at it, it would be extremely faint and not very colourful at all.

To qualify the basic answer, Hubble has various cameras including the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) which sees near-ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared; the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), a spectrograph that sees exclusively in ultraviolet light; the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), a spectrograph that sees ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light; and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) which essentially sees heat not light, if I can put it that way (it's all just different parts of the spectrum). As you can see, an infrared image HAS to be given "false colours" since we can't see infrared, or much UV, and so they have to interpret these images into visible light images so we have an impression of what Hubble sees. Same for images from X-ray telescopes, or Radio telescopes.

Quote: Bullseye "Someone told me all the Hubble pictures are in black and white and the colour is added later by NASA using their interpretations of what is being viewed. Is that right?'"