Just realized most astro photos are colorized, and I'm not sure I'm okay with it

Last night at the club meetup, someone showed me a raw Hubble file next to the final processed shot, and the difference was wild. The nebula we all love is basically grayscale data that gets assigned colors like blue for oxygen and red for sulfur. I get that it's science, but I feel like the public never sees the honest version, we just get these pretty posters. Does anyone else think the processing should be labeled on every image, or am I the only one who feels a bit tricked after 4 years of posting these?

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patricia_wells27d ago

The labeling idea makes sense, but even that gets tricky when you realize nearly every image gets some level of tweaking, even the "raw" ones. Pretty soon you'd need a paragraph of fine print on every telescope photo, and that takes the joy out of just looking at the sky.