its real... well as Rik said a composite. Not sure its so much art really, all they are doing is exagerating different wavelengths, the information is still there. I guess it is art for presentation (and someone will have probably spent ages tweaking it), but the information was there - and indeed the exageration did have a scientifc use (to study the variation acress the image). The idea of mosaiking, or composite making is used all the time in astronomy. Essentially its normally better to take two 5 minute exposures of some object than one 10 minute (for a number of reasons, that I can go into if we want).. but its scientifically fine todo.
I do mosaking all the time, with the radio telescopes I use (the GMRT in particular) we take images of a couple of degrees of the sky which means the sky is not flat, and so to produce the image by combining the power from each antenna we have to deal with the fact that they sky is not flat... this causes some awful mathematics, so to avoid this we cut the data up into blocks, make the images seperately and at the end stitch them back together.
Topic: Is this real? (Read 2206 times)