Description: With a fleet of telescopes in space and giant observatories on the ground, professional astronomers produce hundreds of spectacular images of space every year. These colorful pictures have become infused into popular culture and can found everywhere, from advertising to television shows to memes. But they also invite questions: Is this what outer space really looks like? Are the colors real? And how do these images get from the stars to our screens?
Brief description: Kimberly Kowal Arcand directs visualization efforts for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, at the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Review Quotes: "In an era when NASA's vast photographic archive is a click away and even the Curiosity Rover is on Instagram, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that photographing the cosmos is an amazing achievement and a complex process. Travis Rector reminds us of this in his excellent book, Coloring the Universe. Rector is an astronomer and an expert on the topic; he's used everything from the Hubble Space Telescope to the Very Large Array to make more than 250 photos during the past two decades. He and his co-authors, Kim Arcand and Megan Watzke of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, bring a photographer's sensibility to the book, explaining just how NASA made some of the stunning photos we too often take for granted."-- "Wired"