The color of infinity inside an empty glass

This morning I am watching the lecture I linked to on Tuesday!

At 6:53:

Here is an example of how the Hubble telescope image of the Omega nebula, or Messier 17, was created, by adding colours -- which seem to have been chosen quite arbitrarily -- and adjusting composition.

The slide is figure 13 (on page 10) from an Introduction to Image Processing (PDF) on the ESA Hubble website; I'm baffled at the idea that the colours were chosen "arbitrarily" given that the same PDF contains (starting on page 8) §1.4 Assigning colours to different filter exposures. It's not a super clear explanation -- I think the WonderDome explainer is distinctly more readable -- but the explanation does exist and is there.

Obviously I immediately had to stop and look all of this up.

(Rest of the talk was interesting! But that point in particular about modern illustration as I say made me go HOLD ON A SEC--)

One of the things I found yesterday, while getting distracted from transcription by regretting not having taken History and Philosophy of Science (or, more accurately, not having shown up to the lectures to just listen), was some tantalising notes on the existence of a four-lecture series entitled Visual Culture in Science and Medicine:

Science today is supremely visual – in its experiments, observations and communication, images have become integral to the scientific enterprise. These four lectures examine the role of images in anatomy, natural history and astronomy between the 15th and the 18th centuries. Rather than assessing images against a yardstick of increasing empiricism or an onward march towards accurate observation, these lectures draw attention to the myriad, ingenious ways in which images were deployed to create scientific objects, aid scientific arguments and simulate instrumental observations. Naturalistic styles of depictions are often mistaken for evidence of first-hand observation, but in this period, they were deployed as a visual rhetoric of persuasion rather than proof of an observed object. By examining the production and uses of imagery in this period, these lectures will offer ways to understand more generally what was entailed in scientific visualisation in early modern Europe.

I've managed to track down a one-hour video (that I've obviously not consumed yet, because audiovisual processing augh). Infuriatingly Kusukawa's book on the topic only covers the sixteenth century, not the full timespan of the lectures, and also it's fifty quid for the PDF. I have located a sample of the thing, consisting of the front matter and the first fifteen pages of the introduction (it cuts off IN MID SENTENCE).

Now daydreaming idly about comparative study of this + Tufte, which I also haven't got around to reading...