system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What do the colors in space photos represent and what do they really look like to the naked eye?

This might be a dumb question, but I know that a lot of if not all beautiful pictures of space are artificially colored to represent different data. So what exactly do the different colors mean? (For example a ‘real color’ approximation of Pluto is mostly brown, but a common version features large areas of vibrant reds and blues) more specifically what would various nebulas look like to the human eye? Photos of them are stunning, but if we were there in person would it just look like void empty space?
gpt
Depends on the picture. Some are what we would see of course, but others have a colour assigned to a certain frequency or group of frequencies, eg blue for xray red for radio, all combined into one image. Still others may all be false colour from one group of frequencies, eg false colour infrared.

The colours represent frequencies of light, exactly how the normal colours we see work, only of course these colours are false since we are assigning a colour to a frequency we otherwise wouldn't see. You can also  have a grey scale image which would show different intensity of frequencies, but obviously all the same colour.

Frequencies of light is what they represent. Of light we cannot (edit: mostly cannot) see with our eyes.