#here's my quarterly impromptu astronomy rant. enjoy

[delta-orionis]

People tend to get Very Upset upon learning that a lot of things in space don't look the way they do in photos (most nebulae viewed through a telescope appear gray or pale green, for example). I think it's important to emphasize that the objects in photos are being captured by cameras, not human eyes, which perceive light in a very different way.

Many telescopes (like JWST) capture light invisible to human eyes, so colors in the visible spectrum are assigned to the image so that it can be perceptible to humans. Pictures of things like nebulae and galaxies also tend to have extremely long exposures (they can range from minutes to hours to even days), while the human eye has an exposure time of less than a fraction of a second, and thus perceives color differently.

Re: Neptune not being as blue as we originally thought, those iconic pictures of Neptune and Uranus were taken more than 30 years ago by Voyager 2- no other flybys have occurred since. Those photos were processed three decades ago using three-decade-old techniques, so of course processing them with more modern techniques would end up being more accurate. If (and when) spacecraft with more modern equipment get close enough to take new pictures, they will probably be closer to true color. (source) (source)

I personally think the revelation that Neptune and Uranus are very similar in color is kind of nice. They're already about the same size, and they tend to get thought of like twins. Uranus also gets a lot of flack because its name sounds funny in English (and most people mispronounce it anyways). I'm anthropomorphizing them, I know, but people tend to view them as more boring than the other planets and that makes me sad. They don't deserve the hate.

TLDR: If perceived by the human eye from close up, many things in space would look very boring. I think it's nice that telescopes help us see things that we wouldn't be able to otherwise. Ramble over, lol