I've seen the universe but darkly

Some thoughts on perception in Astronomy, part 1

Iconic image of the spiral galaxy Messier 101 used during the IYA 2009 to promote the Great Observatories Program. It’s a composite image produced from the Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer space telescopes. The blue highlighted regions are from Chandra (X-rays), the red, Spitzer (Infrared) and everything else from Hubble in visible and ultraviolet light.

Back in 2009 during the International year of Astronomy, NASA took the opportunity to celebrate its Great Observatories Program. This program is a semiformal grouping of four orbiting observatories with separate origins: the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, the final mission in NASA's Great Observatories Program. JWST has now taken the place of the vaunted Spitzer Space Telescope as an Infrared observing platform.

Each observes the universe in disparate regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. In doing so, we observe the cosmos with a distinctly differ…