Colorful Clouds Of Carina

Tumultuous clouds of the Carina Nebula , 8000 light-years away, glow in planet Earth's southern sky . Striking and detailed, this close-up of a portion of the famous nebula is a combination of exposures through six different filters taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in April of 1999. Dramatic dark dust knots and complex features revealed are sculpted by the winds and radiation of Carina's massive and energetic stars . But how were this picture's colors generated ? Astronomical images produced from Hubble Space Telescope data can be composed of exposures made using relatively narrow filters which don't match the color responses of the human eye . Some of the filters even transmit wavelengths of light outside the visible spectrum . Exposures made with different narrow filters, as in this case , are translated to a visible color where shorter wavelengths are assigned bluer and longer wavelengths assigned redder colors. This color scheme represents a “chromatically ordered” way of presenting the data rather than a natural color image.