Perhaps some of you are familiar with the appearance of remote astronomical objects only though artwork or long-exposure observatory photographs. These usually give a very inaccurate idea of how such objects might actually look at close range. Photographs or CCD images, by accumulating the light of faint galaxies and nebulae for long periods of time, reveal detail and color imperceptible to any eyeball view. Space artists, including me, usually base their paintings on the photographic, rather than the visual appearance of deep-space objects. To do otherwise would be to produce rather dim, dull pictures of little interest to fans of thick, candy-colored star-fields and multicolored nebulosity. There is much to be said for subtlety, but there is also much to be said for eating regular meals, and alas, in the illustration biz, subtlety does not always equal success. But for now, let's take a quick plunge into the icy waters of astronomical reality.

Suppose you found yourself hovering 300,000 light years or so above the hub of the Milky Way galaxy. A painter might depict its spiral arms clotted with blue and purple stars laced with clusters and nebulous patches. The arms would wind into a core ablaze with white or golden light. The Galaxy might also look that way in a long-exposure color photo. The real Galaxy, as seen by the eye alone, would present a much more subdued, delicate picture.  It would be colorless - the light level would be insufficient to stimulate the retina's color sensitive cones. Detail would be limited, because the low-light rods of the eye are much coarser than the cones and give lower resolution. The spiral pattern would be visible. The hub would be a brighter glow, brightening suddenly at the center to a condensation like a fuzzy star. This is the actual nucleus, a small feature usually lost in photographs because of overexposure of the whole core region, and therefore hardly ever included in paintings. Most galaxies have such a star-like nucleus, often visible in good-sized amateur telescopes. The general effect would be a rather dim, mottled disk of gray light, arranged in an imperfect spiral, brightening to a stronger glow in the center. Only the brightest supergiant stars would be visible as individual points of light.

In an old painting called "Solitude" I included a somewhat realistically-painted galaxy; the effect was decidedly bleak. I included the star-like nucleus in it and in other galaxy paintings, but in many cases I was forced to take liberties with realism to keep the galaxies visible at all. Any significant light source in a picture would drown out a view of a galaxy as easily as a streetlight drowns out the starclouds of the Milky Way.

Under good conditions, a telescope gives views of deep-space objects essentially identical with what you'd see if you were really there. Unfortunately, telescopes are not able to make extended objects (like galaxies or planets as opposed to point light sources like stars) look any brighter than they appear to the unaided eye - the best they can do is make them look bigger while maintaining the same surface brightness seen by the eye alone. Don't take my word for this - seek out a good amateur astronomy manual to learn the limitations of telescopes. When you get to the point where the term "exit pupil" means something to you, you'll pretty much have it figured out.

Bright gaseous nebulae look greenish to the eye. They usually photograph pink or red, and so are often painted that way. The film is responding to the strong red emission called Hydrogen Alpha, to which the eye is not especially sensitive. The eye's peak sensitivity lies in the green-yellow range, convenient for detecting the green light of doubly ionized oxygen. Large telescopes may make it possible to glimpse pinkish areas in the most brilliant nebulae (like M42 in Orion), but in general, if you paint them as anything but ghostly green-gray, you're throwing realism to the stellar winds.

Many of the so-called "planetary nebulae" are intensely bright and strongly colored. They would be truly impressive objects at close range - immense spheres or rings of bright, blue-green light, maybe not fully saturated, but definitely and beautifully blue-green. Ray Crane, the staff artist at the Charles Hayden Planetarium in Boston, once had a display of planetary nebula paintings at an SF convention which I thought was exquisite. They were icy blue - no eye will ever detect the reds and yellows that glare out from photos of planetaries like the Ring Nebula - the colors are there, just too dim to register.

More bad news - there is no such thing as a red star. The light output of a "red" star is about the same as that of a low-power incandescent light bulb - distinctly warm, even golden, but hardly red. Seen at enough distance to look starlike, a light bulb looks just as red as almost any star, which means not very. Antares and Betelgeuse, famous "red giant" stars, have a heavy yellow color, but still give off plenty of blue and even UV light. If we lived beneath one of them, we would soon come to see it as white, just as we consider the yellow glow of a light bulb to be white when it's our only standard of reference. An "orange" star like Arcturus looks about as warm as a car's headlight. So much for The Bloody Sun and lots of paintings, including a number of mine. Ever wonder why Superman doesn't lose his powers under a light bulb?

One possible exception to this might be class N or Carbon stars, which are extremely cool suns whose atmospheres contain carbon compounds that act as red filters. These relatively rare stars look pretty red even in telescopes. Another exception has been brought out by recent discoveries. These are the so-called "brown dwarf stars", gaseous objects somewhere between Jupiter and red dwarfs in size and mass, too small to undergo thermonuclear reactions (and therefore not true stars at all) but big enough to have plenty of internal heat due to gravitational contraction. Their temperature is comparable to that of a bed of campfire coals or the heating element of a toaster - they must be quite red, certainly not brown. A better name for them would be infra-red dwarf stars, but that's not as cute as brown dwarf. The universe is probably littered with them, but they're too faint to detect at any distance.

Moving in a little closer to home, we come to the planets of the Solar System. I have seen both Neptune and Uranus telescopically, and they are not bright green. Things are gloomy out there, two or three billion miles from the sun, so whatever color does exist is subdued. Let's see... at two billion miles from the Sun, Uranus gets about 0.25% as much light as we do. That's far from darkest night, and still amounts to the equivalent of many full Moons, but it doesn't favor saturated colors.  Uranus is a dim, soft greenish gray, while Neptune looks like many planetary nebulae - a light, subdued blue-green tint. Saturn's pretty dim too, getting about 1% as much light as we do. Its disk color is very pale yellow, with hints of green at times, and subtle banding in a kind of golden brown tone. To me, the ring system often has an overall bluish cast, but that may result from contrast with the white-gold disk. Other than that, the A ring seems gray, the B ring white, and the C (crepe) ring a shade of burnt sienna, or sometimes slightly magenta. The whole planet-rings system often appears quite monochromatic, white with only a hint of yellow.

Here's the good news - I can tell you that with good conditions and a good telescope, you can see an amazing and impressive amount of detail on Jupiter. Pamela Lee has done paintings which I thought were good renditions of true Jovian colors. Ron Miller, among others, is also good about not exaggerating the colors. Published colors of the main Jovian moons are also often exaggerated, especially Io, which is usually depicted as a pizza with olives. Its true overall color is yellow with shades of gray and faint green, something like the yolk of a hardboiled egg. No doubt it has details that are a little oranger.

Let me quote from my notes for the colors of Mars: (March 24, 1982, 8" telescope) "A pale white-orange-salmon disk... surface brightness much greater than Saturn's." (April 16, 1982, 8" telescope) "Strong dark markings of a sort of mauve-gray color. General disk color an attractive salmon."

I really don't much care what Venus and Mercury look like. Venus is basically a planetary ping-pong ball, while Mercury is just a big rock. That's a quick survey of my experience with the appearance of cosmic objects. Of course, my perceptions are not absolute, and others might disagree with them. I would be happy to offer any IAAA member who happens to be in my vicinity (which is a very changeable thing of late) a tour of the sky as seen through my own telescopes - an actual look is really the only way to form your own ideas. I would hate to be a landscape painter who'd never seen a lake or mountain except as a computer-enhanced TV picture.

Wherever you are, you should be able to contact a local amateur astronomy club, planetarium, or observatory and arrange to get a look at the sky. A warning: don't expect too much in the way of spectacle from your first few looks through an eyepiece. God may not be malicious, but he's not George Lucas, either. One last thing - no, my own paintings do not always adhere to reality, nor do I think they always need to. After all, we're supposed to be artists, and artists are supposed to be able to do any damn thing they please. Right?