You don't have to invoke aliens as perceiving colors differently, there are plenty of humans who do it, just not in great numbers compared to the general population. And many terrestrial animals and insects "see" well outside of our visual window. Undoubtedly "colors" correspond to energy levels differently for them, than they do for us. You wrote "As good as the camera". Let me try and understand what that means. I'm going get picky here so forgive me, David. That is true if you ignore the fact that the camera (computer, actually, or film emulsion in the old days) builds image intensity over time. In real-time, it is not much better than the eye in the visible part of the spectrum. The tint and saturation of a particular image is rarely aesthetically pleasing in raw format straight from the camera, apparently, so we need to "re-balance" those attributes with image processing software. We spend as much or more time manipulating the image after the file (or files) have been acquired and stored. The (astronomical) camera does none of this, it's all done by either a photo technician at the enlarger, or the computer operator if it's a digital image. The individual is then more artist than documentarian, just by nature of the activity itself. So I stand by my statement that color is still all in the mind, and has no intrinsic qualities at all. "Correct" color is subjective and not objective. Like beauty, it is strictly in the eye of the beholder. On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 2:23 PM, David Rankin <David@rankinstudio.com> wrote:
Thus, if our eye was as good as a camera, the galaxy would look just like the photo.