The JWST, as is well known, is a near and mid infrared telescope, its range (600 to 2850 nm) overlapping with human vision only a little bit in the deep red. So every single JWST image is necessarily in false color.
Even Hubble images are false color as well. It uses filters and then recombines them to RGB channels. People naturally ask what they would actually see, but they actually wouldn't see much of anything. Using a telescope to look at things, one only sees a black and white image. We've been shown so much from sci-fi with space ships showing nebulas and nova remnants out their view screens, but that' just not what one would see.
No. A normal visible light telescope absolutely shows color. You can just point a DSLR with a zoom lens and no filters at the sky, take a picture of M42, and confirm that yourself.
I'm sorry, but the last time I checked a DSLR is not my eye. I have plenty of images from my telescope and various cameras. How you can conflate the 2 is beyond me. Comparing a long exposure from a digital sensor to what your eye can see is beyond bonkers and confusion of the topic at hand, or right in front of our eyes to keep it on subject
Maybe I misread your statement "Using a telescope to look at things, one only sees a black and white image". Certainly you can see color when looking at planets (mars, jupiter, saturn). But more importantly: you can see M42 in color with a telescope and eyes, it doesn't need to be a camera or film. If your point is that it's hard for your retina to detect a rich color spectrum from distant objects without either magnification or time-averaging, sure, but that's not how your comment reads.
Before you jump to "bonkers" maybe give the people you reply to some credit- I'm an amateur astronomer with facts at his disposal.
> Before you jump to "bonkers" maybe give the people you reply to some credit- I'm an amateur astronomer with facts at his disposal.
As am I, and any time I use an eye piece, it is nothing but b&w for DSOs even for something as bright as Orion's Nebula. The spirit of the conversation is if people can see the true color the way images from large telescopes posted in articles like this. They cannot. You take the reaction from the average person that has only seen processed images after looking through a telescope for the first time, and they will almost always have a bit of disappointment in their voice. I have taken my scope to rooftop bars and let patrons look through at whatever can be seen at the time. I have yet to do this and not meet someone that's never looked through a telescope with their own eyes--which is the point of my effort.
I understand. The way you wrote it it sounded like you were implying that the scope itself strips the color spectrum ("black and white") when really it's just the light is so faint that our cones don't really register color while our rods can easily register bright white light. (i work with weird people who don't like false color and instead look at the image as a series of monochromatic filtered images because you can see more detail that way)
For demonstration, I always attach a DSLR to prime focus and display Live View.
Your comment about the colour fidelity of deep sky objects is waay too sloppily written for you to get away with that tone!
I mean, just look at what you wrote:
> Using a telescope to look at things, one only sees a black and white image.
as anyone who owns a telescope that can point at trees knows, you can definitely "look at things" and see them in colour (assuming you have normal colour vision).
> Using a telescope to look at things, one only sees a black and white image.
I remember seeing Jupiter in colors when looking at it from the backyard of a friend of mine.
That telescope didn't have a motor and we were constantly chasing Jupiter manually. It stays inside the ocular only for a few seconds, then Earth points us into another direction.
