I was so disappointed when I learned that all these Hubble images are really black and white pictures and NASA just adds color back to them. Still beautiful.

You see a mind blowing, I see ancient Greece:
http://www.lessing-photo.com/p2/010101/0…

Kind of looks like a hemorrhoid.

Ah, so that's where "choking the chicken" comes from, gus, I always wondered...

But the color is added according to what gases there are and the light they refract. I am so in awe of what we see and understand.

Cock-a-doodle doo, Canuck. Cock-a-doodle doo.

Also known as the Homunculus Nebula. Eta Carinae is a very well-known object in astronomy, being one of the largest and brightest stars in our galaxy.

Here's a real photo:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060326.html

Philosophical nit-picking: The Hubble telescope is not "the eye of the universe," it is humanity's eye *on* the universe.

The eye *of* the universe is looking at you, Charles...

#10 for the hilarious (& true!) win!! :-D

That said, it looks like a chicken gizzard to me.

Root - They base the colors on scientific reality. Presence of certain gases that will tend to refract various frequencies of visible light, etc. They also make visual equivalents of radio waves and gamma rays (things we can't see but are nonetheless real). It's no more artificial than an image of a microscopic organism artificially enlarged through a microscope. I don't think it gives us a false perspective of its true nature.

Fifty-two-eighty - You're right. When I see a SLIGHTLY LESS COLORFUL version of a picture of a doomed star, going nuclear-critical at various stages, sending plumes of gas and flowering bursts of energy covering the entire spectrum of light from gamma to radio waves, realizing that this happens BILLIONS of times every earth day in a turbulent cosmic cauldron roiling with the birth, death, and rebirth of the very building blocks of our reality...

I realize that it's actually not that cool.