system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are there visible "clouds" in space?

I've recently played the game Star Citizen and was quite confused that there are actually cloud-like structures in space. I thought they would not exist in reality so I searched the internet for answers. But couldn't find any.


I know, it's a game. So it might just be a fantasy element. But I also know that there are tons of gases in space, which can take up a lot of space. But can you actually see them? I've seen pictures of nebulas as well but if I understand it correctly, you can only see them with some color correction or something? 

Can someone help me understand this please?
gpt
Nebulae are real, and are visible with a small telescope, or even *just barely* with the naked eye.

You can just barely see a bit of fluffiness around one of the stars in Orion's sword. There's also a bit of faint cloudiness visible in the Pleiades star cluster. These are actual nebulae that are visible with the naked eye. They're just far away and quite dim.

You can also sort of make out the dust lanes in the Milky Way, as darker splotches on the Milky Way - although there's a lot of foreground stars as well, so it's quite subtle.

If you look through a telescope, or use a spaceship close to a nebulae, the brightness doesn't actually change - it just covers more of the sky. It will be visible as a faint grey cloudiness. Sometimes it might be thick enough to look basically black.

The density of these clouds is really quite low though. They're only visible because they're so huge - often many light years thick - and that does add up to a decent amount of dust and gas along your line of sight. So it's not like the space opera trope where you can hide in a nebula for a sneak attack, because nobody can see more than a few hundred metres or whatever. It's the same thing as asteroid fields, which are exaggerated for drama in space opera. In either case, in reality you could be right in the middle of one and barely even notice.

These nebulae *do* have colour to them, but these colours aren't easy to see when they're so dim. If you use a normal phone camera and point it through a telescope, and set the exposure to be really long, you can indeed see some colour in these nebulae, without any special post-processing. However, because there's nothing particularly special or unique about human vision, in astrophysics we sometimes colour things to give the most information and best contrast, rather than mimicking what a human in a spaceship would actually see.