Quote:
Originally Posted by 209herschel
...but I thought I'd see that reddish smear
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It's unlikely that you'll see colour in DSOs, but not impossible.
Our eyes see things by the use of rods and cones. In simplistic terms, the rods take care of luminance and the cones take care of colour. In low light, the cones are inactive and only the rods are active, which is why we see essentially only in monochrome in the dark.
Some objects - brighter planets for example - can activate the cones again, which is why many of us see coloured feature on them.
Read up on photopic vs scotopic vision for more details.