If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss. This manuscript is far more accessible when presented in our own native tongue, which for most of us is English: It is probably a fair bet that this representation is unreadable to most of you who are successfully reading this blog. It happens to be a page from Sun Tsu’s The Art of War. Take a look at the manuscript to the right. What we represent in multi-band astronomical images is not.īut it’s our own fault if point is not understood by the public when we tell them the colors are “false.” Mo’s blue shirt in the colorized version of the Three Stooges is an arbitrary artistic choice. To insinuate that astronomical imagery taken across the spectrum of light and rendered into hues we can see is phony, and essentially the same thing, really undermines the authenticity of the science in the eyes of the public. Ted Turner’s contribution to classic cinema was to have modern artists take black and white film and paint colors on top of it, making completely abritrary decisions as to whether a dress should be red or green. Many are colorized far more radically than any 1930s movie. The Hubble pictures are all in black and white colors are imposed to approximate hues suggested by frequency data… Even the image creators acknowledge they may not resemble what an eye in galactic space might see. Well, the colors are as phony as the sound. Towards the end of the review he takes a left turn into nonsense as he begins critisizing Hubble (and by association most other astronomical) imagery:
In one instance, consider an otherwise delightful review of a planetary photography exhibit at the Haden Planetarium that appeared in the New York Times. Does that sound like an overreaction? Unfortunately there is evidence to suggest otherwise. I would argue that using a term that carries an insinuation of falsification of data simply opens the door to mistrust of what that data represents. This is especially true for the public perception of science, which, let’s face it, is not doing as well as it should at the moment. Words are powerful, and connotations can greatly influence the way people perceive information. In many cases it indicates a premeditated intent to deceive. We have a pretty established linguistic convention that “false _” refers to something that is an actual misrepresentation of the truth. Let us take a minute to consider other similar “false” terms that are in common use: What is false about that? Absolutely nothing! False Implications That’s pretty cool, and it is revealed through very real colors, just not exactly the ones our eyes see. That final filter is assigned to the red color of the image, so everything we see as red (or white) reveals high altitude clouds and haze that sit above Neptune’s methane layer. It shows the planet through three filters: red, green, and an infrared color that is absorbed by methane gas. So why do I hate this term so much? I mean, after all, images that don’t show things the way our eyes see them aren’t true, are they? Wikipedia (at the moment) defines this terrible term thusly:įalse color refers to a group of color rendering methods used to display images in color which were recorded in the visual or non-visual parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is far from a new rant for me, but I figured it would be as good as any place to start for my new astronomyVIZ blog. What I hate is the horrifically terrible, yet disturbingly ubiquitous term “ false color.” Now before anyone gets riled up, let me point out that I simply adore the incredible array of astronomical imagery that represents amazing data collected from across the spectrum, and is lovingly rendered into color representations that we can all enjoy. After all, any image that falsifies color must be wildly misleading, right? Who wants that?