I feel like "what would it look like if I was there with my own eyes?" is a question that is decreasingly interesting the more you think about it.

Your wall would look very different depending on whether the sun or your lamp shines on it. Or maybe you're in complete darkness?

What does the sun look like up close? Your eyes would malfunction.

A picture could look very different depending on lens and camera settings.

Your perception could be very different from that of someone who has just woke up in a dark room, walked in from the sun, or peaking on acid.

I guess "convey information" would be an important principle to both brains and astronomists.

What if the object you are observing are redshifted? Does compensating for the redshift give you a more or less "authentic" image?

What if you were to be a species distinct from whatever you are now? With different eyes, perception and cognition?

What if you're looking out the window of a spaceship at relativistic speed? Is is it fake?

So when comparing Webb and Hubble images, we cannot rule out that the colours have been enhanced in post processing and comparisons taken with a grain of salt?

False color images are common in astronomy as they're working with spectrum ranges wider than our eyes. There's nothing about this that requires a grain of salt style skepticism.

There is no naked eye picture to compare it with, so you can't say enhanced. To answer your question, though, the JWST pictures and the Hubble pictures were turned into RGB images in the same way.

> JWST pictures and the Hubble pictures were turned into RGB images in the same way

Webb and Hubble have different filters so what does this mean? Did they just take some Webb filters and pretended they where Hubble filters and ran their old code?

What I mean is, a telescope will produce several arrays of numbers detailing the number of photons received by each sensor pixel, one array for each frequency it measures. Then you pick three arrays and pack them into a bitmap as the R G and B components. At most you can get fancy by letting it mix three artistically chosen colors (rather than red green and blue), but a lot of pictures don't even involve that. That's the same between Webb, Hubble and any other telescope. Even digital cameras do it - they differ from the human eye, not by a lot but noticeably under some conditions.

Hubble images are also frequently "enhanced".

Not all the wavelengths these telescopes capture can be seen by the human eye so some post processing is necessary for the "publicity shots"

A lot of the real science is not done visually but by analysing the data

The colours are arbitrary anyways. Thanks to redshift, they represent distance in time and space away.

Though I suppose if one has the distance one could shift back to the color it would be without redshift. Kinda tricky with light from multiple sources in a single pixel of course, and I'm not sure it would be terribly exciting overall.

Still, would be interesting I think.

> we cannot rule out that the colours have been enhanced in post processing

The JWST literally cannot take colour images, the colours are entirely a post processing choice.

And there really isn't any obvious choice either, I suspect they chose colour values so the end result looks like a Hubble image.

The Webb pics would be invisible to humans without enhancing the colors.

Though most things probably look pretty similar in visible light.

The main problem with visible light is it's absorbed and scattered by dust. It's Webb's ability to see through all that dust in the IR spectrum that reveals a huge amount of information and images Hubble and our eyes would never be able to see.