Yes, but....
A few to things to remember. This telescope takes pictures in a part of the light sprectrum which is invisible to the human eye. So any coloration, even black and white, is a distortion of reality.
Colors reare different parts of the visible light spectrum. What you see here are different parts of the infrared, invisible spectrum. If we could see in that band we'd see more colors. So it is appropriate to use colors we know inorder to depcit that range of spectra.
Finally, all cameras can only record monochromatic images. they just happen to record three of them. Color images are created by filtering light into its components and recording each third of the sprectrum in a black and white image. Subsequently those three layers are used to either make a print or with substution a slide.
So the answer is yes, the colors are artificial, but then so is all photography.
So, yes, false colors. But if the real colors were shown, the pictures would look black to our human eyes.
You are about fifty percent correct,you can't see infrared so technically it is all in black and white. But the telesope sees a range of frequencies, so normally they color code on the basis of a mapped spectrum. There's artistic license in the sense that you can pick which color goes with which frequency.
The computers produce false-color images based on the wavelengths of light hitting the sensors. The phrase "...designed to paint a more comprehensive picture of the cosmos using different wavelengths of light" from the article is appropriate.
But then, no astro-photo really shows what an object would look like to the human eye anyway - even those taken on regular film. The photos are basically time-lapse. The "shutter" remains open for a certain amount of time (sometimes hours), allowing the image to burn onto the film. Our retinas don't work like that, and film is much more color-sensitive.
Having said all that, the 3-D quality of the images above is really striking!!
What they do (and I am no expert)is have the tops of those telescopes (the round part) be able to rotate at the same speed as the earth turns.
When the sun goes down they focus on one small speck in the sky and turn that big baby on and leave it all night.
What it does is collect light. Its like a timed exposure sort of because the light is SO faint.
They have massive mirrors inside that are specially crafted that reflect the light.
I think they turn those signals that are captured actually into numbers. If you saw the raw data it looks like a print out of just long pages of numbers about 30 feet long. Those images are actually recorded numerically (I think).
Then they take that data and put it into a computer than can read it and turn it into images.
BTW they put those scopes in Hawaii on top of mountains because of several reasons 1) Dust. the ocean traps much of the dust. 2)the height makes a difference. 3) the station on the globe.
From what I understand even the earths own atmosphere distorts the light...so sometimes the pics are a no go...
I have to find the literature they gave me when I was there in order to confirm all of this :o)
Thats why they are moving into putting telescopes in space...
But hey, I don't know anything about astronomy.
Yes. It's false color as they call it. Several bands of 'color' are recorded and then transformed into visible colors to bring out various features. They could have rendered shades of green or just brightnesses of gray if they wanted.