I guess I do have more to say. I appreciate your comments, Joe. Very insightful. What you described is not weird at all; people with some forms of autism sense the world around them very differently than you and I. Their brains are organized differently, exactly as you surmised. I'm not qualified to discuss exactly why, but it's probably some gentetically caused structural difference. But I digress, I just wanted to point out an example of the truth of what you hypothesized. It's real. I do hate to keep harping on this, but it's the essense of what I've been trying to say- the sky is only "blue" as seen by humans, and probably by other earthly creatures who evolved here. That's the root of what I've been trying to convey. We as a species, and probably as members of a larger group of species sharing part of the evolutionary tree, perceive certain colors that are associated with specific wavelengths of light. *But it is not a subjective, intrinsic quality of that wavelength- it's just the way we are constructed that allows us to see the sky as "blue". It's the way we are built that has associated the colors with those wavelengths. * ** Here's a better way to address Davids comments about the camera recording "accurate" colors: The cameras and hardware were DESIGNED to emulate human spectral response. Now think critically about that statement in the context of the sentence underlined above. Yes, I have seen colors visually, especially in M42, through large apertures. But again, those colors are in my brain, not in the nebula. Even if you were standing right in the middle of that nebula, to the unaided eye it would appear a colorless grey. The colors we see that are the result of long exposures or large apertures in no way represent the natural (read: unassisted by technology, a visual impression only) appearance of the object. They represent the different wavelengths emitted by the object, AS PERCEIVED by humans, and not due to, here we go again, a subjective, intrinsic quality of that wavelength. Carl Sagan said that "We are a way for the Universe to know itself". We are a part of the universe and although it would be a huge waste of space, if we were the only intelligent species in the universe, it would be enough, taken in the context of Sagan's statement. Think about it for a minute. There are life forms without a visual sense at all. But it takes a visual sense, as far as living creatures on earth are concerned, to see the stars at night and make Sagan's statement true. The evolution of vision, and the ability to distinguish wavelengths by assigning a perception of different colors to them, is a pretty remarkable thing. Just because those colors only exist in your mind doesn't diminish their importance. I gotta go excercise. I do 130 carbs on the elliptical daily, then I hit the weights (what color are carbs?). Have fun.