Are nebulas actually all those bright colors?
The nebulae really are those colours, but you can’t normally see the colours with your naked eye. All of the pictures of coloured nebulae are long time exposures to bring out the colour and detail. But the human eye is not sensitive to colours in dim light, so all you will see 99% of the time through a telescope visually is shades of grey, some of them exceedingly dim. The miracle is that we can see them at all with our very limited eyes. In 50 years of observing, I’ve only seen colour in nebulae a few times, mostly with very large apertures (18″ and up). You can see colour in the planets and in stars, because they are relatively bright, but not in nebulae or galaxies.
