They can even be a mixture between the two. The trouble is, it's not always clear whether an image you see floating around online is true color (showing visible light) or false color (showing invisible light). All the images arrive to Earth as black-and-white frames, and then are assigned colors digitally and compiled into a composite. Others, like ultraviolet and infrared, capture light it can't. Some, like red and blue, capture light the human eye can see. In Otherworlds, Benson tries his best to create images that represent what a moon or planet might actually look like if you could peer at it out a spaceship window.Ĭameras aboard spacecraft like New Horizons and Cassini take images using filters that isolate different wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum. By the early 2000s he started making composite space photos, and is now renowned for his work-director Terrence Malick even enlisted his help for the space scenes in Tree of Life. In the late 1990s, he logged onto an early modem and spent hours perusing pictures of Jupiter that Galileo sent down. 'I feel like if these places are so alien to our direct experiences anyway, then they should be colored the way they would be seen,' he says.īenson, 53, was fascinated with space while growing up, but became truly obsessed when the Internet came along. The work spans five decades of space exploration, and presents a realistic, flyby tour of the universe. The artist took data from NASA and ESA missions to make 77 images of everything from Pluto to Europa that approximate true color as much as humanly possible. Michael Benson tries his best to show you in his exhibition Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System. But if you’re a skeptic, you’ve likely wondered whether it all truly looks like that in real life. Their beauty is dazzling, showing a universe awash in color and light.

Printable pictures of eyeballs