Recently I was working on a project for Motion Graphics and Animation, my other class with Arturo. I was creating a title sequence set in space, with lots of interesting astronomical features. Before I started, I did some looking around, trying to find inspiration and get a feel for what space looks like, so I looked through a lot of the Hubble Telescope images, and other images published by NASA. The image above is fairly representative of these images. They are brightly colored and very detailed, and they look great. The problem is, they are not what you would see were you in space, and they are not even what your camera would see. They are a composite of lots of different light besides visible light; this image also has information about UV light and radio waves and other things invisible to the eye. The coloring is added later to distinguish this information. So while it is useful for astronomers and astro-physicists, it is less useful for getting a good idea of what it actually looks like.
However, just yesterday I ran across this video, which shows astronaut Chris Hadfield on the ISS showing off how he takes photos from the international space station. I found the technical information about exposure values and such very interesting, and it was also enlightening to see what our planet looks like from outer space. And there's a perk to shooting from space: those giant lenses don't weigh anything. Here's an example of one of his amazing images:
