You said — Hubble was the best money Nasa has spent in the last 20 years. Outstanding photos.
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Yes, they are outstanding “artificial constructs” of something that we can’t see in space.
That’s what these people who release these photos are doing — i.e., trying to “justify” from a P.R. standpoint, the costs for the project. The data they are gathering may very well be extremely useful from a scientific viewpoint, but what is “seen” is *not* what these photos are showing you.
These are colorized and certain elements are chosen to be “represented” in them. It’s a carefully “doctored” and “constructed” photo from instrumentation and their measurements, in which you would probably see *nothing at all* with your own eyes.
These people know that the public will be more enthused by “pretty colored pictures” than raw data and “instrumentation”. So...., they make up these pictures to give you the so-called “beauty” that you are seeing. They are “artificially” beautiful — according to someone’s “artwork” that they’ve done in doctoring the data and assigning colors to them.
Please do keep that in mind — because you’re not going to see what you see in these pictures — as actually “out there” in the universe.
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HOWEVER, having said that, the “mathematics” of the “physics” that allow the certain elements to radiate at certain frequencies and which create a “pattern” for those particular elements (which you *cannot see* with your eyes) — may be “beautiful” (in the mathematical constructs). These “photos” however, are artificially and “man-made constructs” which bear absolutely no resemblance to the reality of what you’ll actually see.
Every party has a pooper... ;-)